A judge in Oakland, California ruled that
Facebook does indeed have to face a class action lawsuit charging that
the social media firm violated user privacy when it scanned the contents
of users' messages for the purposes of targeting advertising to those
users.
From the
Los Angeles Times:
Judge [Phyllis] Hamilton denied Facebook’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit,
which was filed by Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley in
2013. The suit alleges that until October 2012, when the social network
says it stopped the practice, it scanned the content of private
messages sent between users for links to websites, which were then used
for delivering targeted advertising. The complaint alleges that this
violated the federal and state privacy laws by “reading its users’
personal [and] private Facebook messages without their consent."
Facebook had argued that the practice was covered by an exception under
the federal Electronics Communications Privacy Act, and that it
disclosed to users that it “may use the information we received about
you” for “data analysis." But Judge Hamilton said the company had “not
offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls
within the ordinary court of business,” and that the disclosure was not
specific enough to establish that users expressly consented to the
scanning of the content of their messages.
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