Facebook Sued For Allegedly Using Your Private Messages To Trigger Ads
An Arkansas lawyer and political blogger has sued Facebook for allegedly using data from private messages to target ads.
Matt Campbell, author of the left-leaning muckraking site the
Blue Hog Report, filed a class-action complaint on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Campbell is suing the tech giant alongside co-plaintiff Michael Hurley, an Oregon resident who was unavailable for comment.
The core of their complaint concerns the access advertisers have to messages. From the complaint:
Contrary to its representations, "private" Facebook messages are systematically intercepted by the Company in an effort to learn the contents of the users' communications... This practice...enables Facebook to mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties — namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.
...
An advertiser can only send ads to a user if that user has
some connection to the brand in question. A connection can include group membership or a "like" of that brand's corporate page.
Hacker News revealed back in Oct. 2012 that a shared link within a private message between Facebook users also counts toward the total. Facebook admitted this to the
Wall Street Journal in that publication's follow-up story. In that same response, Facebook said that "absolutely no private information has been exposed."
