A judge in Oakland, California ruled on Tuesday that Facebook does indeed have to face a class action lawsuit charging that the social media firm violated user privacy when it scanned the contents of users’ messages for the purposes of targeting advertising to those users. The suit alleges that until October 2012, when the social network says it stopped the practice, it scanned the content of private messages sent between users for links to websites, which were then used for delivering targeted advertising. The complaint alleges that this violated the federal and state privacy laws by “reading its users’ personal [and] private Facebook messages without their consent.”
Details may be found by Tracey Lien in the Los Angeles Times at http://goo.gl/RBDrgI.
I suspect Google will be watching this case closely as its Gmail service does something similar.
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Categories: Online Privacy & Security
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