JUDGE SLAPS FACEBOOK WITH PRIVACY VIOLATION RULING.
U.S District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled thatFacebook must “face the consequences” of violating its users’ privacy by actually scanning the messages they have been sending to other users as a form of advertising.
The US judge from Oakland, California deniedFacebook the right to dismiss the lawsuit but acquiesced to dismissing a few other claims against the company.
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Facebook insists that their scanning of the messages is not unlawful under the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The social media giant claims that in this act, there is an exception for service providers using the act in their everyday business.
Judge Hamilton, on the other hand, insisted that this explanation by Facebook was not convincing enough nor did it stand in the light of “ordinary course of business”.
The 2013 lawsuit says that Facebook scanned private messages which contained website links for advertisers and then collected the “likes” count of the pages. They used this count to create their own profiles and used them to deliver advertising to its users.
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Matthew Campbell, the FaceBook user filing the lawsuit on behalf of all US users who had sent private messages containing website addresses, says that FaceBook’s actions were against the federal and California state law.
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While Facebook claims that is put a halt to this practice back in October 2012, it admits that it still analyses messages for the purpose of protection against viruses and spam.
