The war for privacy seems to be as strong as ever. Every single major social or search engine company are now in court rulings across the world, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Snapchat etc. to defend their position towards user’s privacy. Facebook is being sued by a private group of men for illegaly collecting private messages for it’s company’s profit. Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley filed a suit in California for scanning private messages and tracking the URL’s that are being shared. These actions are taken in order to data mine and profile the user’s for it’s own company profits. These are infact illegal by the ECPA regulations and the two men are trying to prove Facebook’s fault in court.
Facebook sued for privacy voilations
Facebook quickly released a statements saying that: “We believe the allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously”, as would probably any major company do. Security company High-Tech Bridge suggests that Facebook scan private messages that contain shared links and collect the statistics so that they could generate user profiles and make their preferences and decisions easier. The statement suggest that “likes” are also tracked via third party plug-ins installed in Facebook.
The suer’s continued to explain their concern towards the safety issues stating that: “Representing to users that the content of Facebook messages is ‘private’ creates an especially profitable opportunity for Facebook, because users who believe they are communicating on a service free from surveillance are likely to reveal facts about themselves that they would not reveal had they known the content was being monitored,” this ofcourse causes great mistrust not only to the private groups, but to the simple everyday Facebook user as well.
The filed suit represents all of the U.S. citizens that uses Facebook and have sent an URL message that could of have been intercepted. The private group expects to win the ruling and disable Facebook from the possibility to continue collecting private information. The filed complain also carries a $100 fine by the ECPA law for everyday that the users were not informed about a possible tracking of their messages, for each and every individual. One could quickly calculate that the sum combined could be of significant amount.
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