Facebook Must Face Lawsuit Over Scanning Users’ Private Messages For Advertising Purposes

Facebook Privacy

Facebook are in a spot of bother again. And again it’s to do with privacy. A US judge has ruled that the social media giant has violated its users’ privacy by scanning private messages for advertising purposes.

Facebook had argued that the alleged scanning of its users’ messages was covered by an exception under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act for interceptions by service providers occurring in the ordinary course of business.

However the ruling judge, Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland California, said Facebook had not provided a sufficient sufficient of how its scanning practises fell in to the “ordinary course of business”.

The lawsuit, filed in 2013, alleged that Facebook scanned the content of private messages sent between users for links to websites and would then count any links in a tally of “likes” of the pages.

Those “likes” were then used to compile user profiles, which were then used for delivering targeted advertising to its users, the lawsuit said.

The current violations directly affect some California-based laws and have not yet been taken over to other states or overseas.

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