Social media giant Facebook is being sued for the alleged monitoring of its users’ private messages in order to gather more consumer data that it in turn shares with marketers.
A federal lawsuit filed in San Jose, California alleges that Facebook traces the contents of users’ private messages, including links to other websites, “to improve its marketing algorithms and increase its ability to profit from data about Facebook users,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
A link to another site is read as a “like” of that website. The information contributes to a comprehensive profile on the user’s activity that is collected by Facebook and that eventually becomes material for targeted advertising, the lawsuit claims.
The reality is that it’s unlikely this lawsuit will get very far. Facebook has been sued before over privacy issues and it basically comes down to “buyer beware.” Users of Facebook agree to the terms Facebook offers and those terms provide it broad rights of use to what the user provides on the site.
Which is why I have little to do with Facebook and always tell others to stop using it, as they do. Too much information and Facebook does little to protect it from people wanting to sell you something or the government just wanting to know something.
The two plaintiffs in this latest case are seeking a class action suit on behalf of all Facebook users who have sent or received a private message in the past two years that contained links.
The allegations are “without merit,” said Facebook spokeswoman Jackie Rooney.
“We will defend ourselves vigorously,” she told the LA Times in an emailed statement. That’s another way of saying, We have so much money we’ll drag this out for years if we have to and you’ll be broke before you can even see a possible end to it.
Hackers News was first to surface Facebook’s supposed practice of scanning private messages and converting links to “likes” in 2012.
Three weeks ago, a new study showed that Facebook records everything users type on the social networking site, including notes they choose to delete instead of posting.
Adam Kramer, a data scientist employed by the social network, studied the profiles of 3.9 million people for the study, dubbed “Self-Censorship on Facebook.” Kramer viewed activity on each profile by monitoring its HTML form element, which is made up of HTML code that changes whenever a user types in their Facebook chat, status update, or other areas where they speak to others.
While Facebook claims it does not track the words that are written in each box, the company is able to determine when characters are typed, how many words are typed, and whether they are posted or deleted. Kramer, with help from student Sauvik Das, spent 17 days tracking “aborted status updates, posts on other people’s timelines, and comments on other posts.”
The social network site does offer opt-outs for certain advertising features, such as whether a user’s consumer brand likes are shared with others and, perhaps tellingly, the ability to opt out of any future decision to allow third-party sites to use a user’s name or picture in advertisements.
Facebook – which is again expected to pay no federal taxes this year – is not alone among major tech companies facing lawsuits that claim privacy violations. Google has been sued in federal court, accused of illegally accessing the contents of email sent through its Gmail service, a violation of US wiretapping law.
Also earlier this month, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency has quietly subverted the tools used by online advertising companies in order to track surveillance targets and improve its monitoring ability.
Disclaimer: On January 4, 2016, the owner of WestEastonPA.com began serving on the West Easton Council following an election. Postings and all content found on this website are the opinions of Matthew A. Dees and may not necessarily represent the opinion of the governing body for The Borough of West Easton.
