Facebook strikes again with privacy - The País.com (Spain)

Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley, two users of Facebook, have filed a lawsuit against the popular social network, accusing him of using, without permission, posts data to share with advertisers.

The lawsuit, filed in a California court on December 30, is based on the commitment of Facebook to respect the “privacy” of messages. According to the indictment, the social network that does not respect privacy because when users linked drafted messages and sends them to a third party, Facebook analyzes your content, follow the link and look for information to profile the user activity on the Internet, which will subsequently advertisers will pay for performing advertising campaigns with the consumer and, therefore, more effective. According to the applicants, this activity violates the Privacy Act Electronic Communications of the state of Califonia.

“That scan is a mechanism for Facebook to surreptitiously collect data to improve their trading algorithms and increase their capacity to benefit from the user data,” argued in its brief Michael Sobol, attorney for the plaintiffs.

Jackie Rooney, Facebook spokesman, dismissed the complaint, calling it “baseless”, but in August, the social network decided to pay 20 million dollars (14.6 million euros) to close a popular demand from the use of “likes”-the “like” – without permission of the authors. Those likes served him for the same thing: advertising campaigns. At that time 614,000 users signed the petition, which received average about $ 30 (22 euros).

applicants aspire to the judge considers the complaint as a class, which could be added to any Facebook user because in the last two years have sent or received a private message with links. The applicants claim that Facebook stop such practices or otherwise offset by $ 100 (73 euros) per day or $ 10,000 (7,300 euros) to each applicant.

lawsuits against Internet companies and social networks are multiplying in recent years. Google, Yahoo! and LinkedIn have faced allegations of interception of communications without permission from their clients which have had to vary the conditions of use of its services. A few weeks ago, Google was fined by the Spanish Agency for Data Protection data across its different services without the express permission of their customers.