A US District Court in California has ruled that a suit that targets Facebooks #dataharvesting practices can go forward. The company had attempted to have the whole thing tossed out, but only succeeded in having two relatively minor allegations dismissed. There are three plaintiffs to the suit, all of whom allege that various state and federal statutes were violated by Facebooks practice of scanning private messages in order to target ads more precisely. They also are upset that the mention of any company in these messages ends up counting as a like. Their suit [PDF] alleges that Facebooks messaging service is designed to allow users to communicate privately with other users, and the scanning therefore violates the federal #Wiretap Act as well as California’s Invasion of #Privacy Act. ... The court responded to this request by pursuing an extraordinarily rare course of action: it read Facebooks entire #termsofservice. And, in this case, their vague language—typically used to provide broad immunity—became a liability: [the document] does not establish that users consented to the scanning of their messages for advertising purposes, and in fact, makes no mention of messages whatsoever. Thus, the plaintiffs may have had reason to expect that their messages would remain private. And, although the practice may have been discontinued, the plaintiffs allege that Facebook could start scanning messages again whenever it wanted to. The remaining arguments focused on whether the practice of scanning was a normal part of messaging operations. After all, an e-mail service provider doesnt intercept message when handling them on a server; its an essential part of how e-mail works. Here, the judge ruled that, in the absence of any explanation of how the scanning system worked required that it be sorted out in court: Facebook’s unwillingness to offer any details regarding its #targetedadvertising practice prevents the court from being able to determine whether the specific practice challenged in this case should be considered ordinary.” ... arstechnica/tech-policy/2014/12/suit-over-facebooks-practice-of-scanning-users-messages-to-go-forward/
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 17:55:01 +0000
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