Facebook Under Fire for Private Message Mining
A class-action lawsuit against Facebook has been filed in Canada. The allegations state that Facebook was harvesting data through scanning its users’ private messages without their knowledge.
The social media site did not disclose to users that private messages would be scanned for content to collect data for third-party companies. URLs collected from those messages were considered “Likes” for the companies’ sites, and also helped companies with user profiling.
In the U.S. a similar suit was filed against Facebook in December. Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of all U.S. Facebook users who were unaware that content in their private Facebook messages was scanned without their consent. The complaint stated that Facebook failed to inform users of its actions, and that the company had claims implying “the promise that only the sender and the recipient or recipients will be privy to the private message’s content, to the exclusion of any other party, including Facebook.”
The link shared in a private message would represent two additional “Likes” to a company’s Facebook page. This allowed companies to increase its amount of “likes” and potentially “pump up to 1,800 ‘Likes’ an hour,” Hacker News reported.
Allegedly, Facebook profited from sharing data with the third-party sites and companies, which included advertisers, marketers and other data aggregators. The Wall Street Journal exposed the social media mogul in an October 2012 report, after which Facebook stopped the scanning.
Facebook responded in a statement, placing blame on “a bug with our social plugins where at times the count or ‘Likes’ goes up by two.” The company also said that many websites use the “Like”, “Recommend” and “Share” buttons and use a counter to monitor how many times people click those buttons, including through private messages.
With pending lawsuits, Facebook may want to rethink its privacy policies.
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