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Facebook-Deprived Man Sues For $500K
broggyr writes "According to a story from MSNBC: 'For Mustafa Fteja, Facebook is more than just a hobby. It's the main way the 30-year-old Albanian native has stayed in touch with friends and family all over the world for three years, and when he was inexplicably cut off from it, he did what every other person in this country seems to do when they're mad enough: he sued. In seeking $500,000, Fteja is suing Facebook for disabling his account, in which he had about 340 friends and family and had spent "timeless hours creating content and relationships [Facebook] benefited from," the suit contends. He wants it back on, and he wants the company to pay for the damage of alienating him from his family and friends (about $1500 per friend/family).' Must be nice when you can use a free site and expect to get paid when they cut you off."
Considering you are required to give up your rights to any information posted on Facebook, does that not indicate you are in fact paying a fee for using it? It might not be a monetary fee, but a fee none the less.
Hasn’t this been tried with google?
No matter how engrained a free service becomes in your life, unless you have a contract with the provider I can’t see how you are in any way entitled to damages when it’s taken away from you.
And at least in the google case I can sympathize. I still think google has the right to do so, but I can feel for the small business that suddenly loses it’s income stream because google lowers their rank. This is a social networking site... get a grip and/or a life.
"Free as in Beer" is becoming expensive these days! If we're going to agree we're now discussing Facebook as the metagame to adapt around, then we can't just give them a free pass to boot the user but keep all his nice crispy data they gathered for their ads.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You still have Telephone, you still have Internet, you still have any number of ways that people can use to keep in touch. No more than 20 years ago, we didn't even have Internet as commonly as we do now. This is not a requirement for you to live. They didn't cut off your power unjustly, or even your phone line. When I read "More than just a hobby" I thought it was going to explain that he makes a living through facebook... maybe then I'd see where he's coming from. As it is, all I see is another facebook addict who feels that it's his god given right to keep up to date with his friends.
This looks like a pretty clear cut cash grab. He says it's for "Justice" but I call bullshit on that. Justice in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars maybe. Too bad for him, I'm pretty sure there is something in the EULA that would state Facebook reserves the right to cancel your account for whatever reason they want. I don't know what this guy is expecting to have happen. In the end, frankly, I hope they counter sue for legal costs. Suing for a ridiculous reason like this shouldn't go unpunished. It's an affront to the legal system to be wasting it's time like this.
Now, having not actually RTFA yet, I can't comment on the merits of the case.
However, the sum he's suing for is relatively small, compared to most of the crazy lawsuits I've seen - usually, they seek at least $10M, sometimes much, much more, all the way into the trillions. That itself says something about the case - it may be more about actual justice than profiteering.
PS: The guy is claiming a friendship is worth $1,500. Minimum statutory damages for "pirating" a single album is $7,500, or five friends. That alone says much about the US judicial system and this case.
Same situation here. I've been cursed with a native Estonian forename "Anti" ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Anti ; it is not a rare name here, i know multiple Antis and even some celebrities are named Anti). Facebook is very strict about using real names and they are having automatic to ensure that... And my forename fails the check. A year ago, it took me about a month of e-mailing to register an account. I even had to scan and send my passport copy to prove I'm real.
Fast forward one year... Today morning, I'm unable to log in. Facebook tells my account has been suspended and I have to enter my real name to proceed. I enter my real name again and get an e-mail that my account is deleted now and they do not accept any further correspondence regarding that matter. Let's see if they answer to my e-mails or I'm banned from facebook forever just because my forename.
Mustafa Fteja??? The letters 'F' and 'T' should never appear next to each other without a vowel separating them, unless it is at the end of a word such as 'draft' or 'theft'.
After reading your comment I must say that's a rather lofty claim. I could probably debunk it further if I spent more than fifteen seconds on it.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
but you know what, it's becoming increasingly hard to function effectively without a Facebook account
No, it really isn't.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Trumped by basic contract law.
Just because you signed it, doesn't mean it was a reasonable contract and, therefore, doesn't mean those sections are legally binding.
Otherwise, everyone in the world would write contracts that meant they could never be sued for anything ever even if your cars brakes fall off on your first trip from the showroom, while all their employees would be whipped to death each day to make them work. Hey, they signed the contract that said it was okay!
Contract law is only as binding as the court reasonably construes. Hell, even the jurisdiction statements in a lot of contracts don't work because they say all cases are bound by US law when they operate in the EU. Can't happen, or every company in the world would be using Country X's harsh regime to run their business legal departments and referring customers from all countries to their legal decisions in that country.
There's tons of confusion about who Facebook's customers are. This kind of confusion goes back to television and radio stations, and popular magazines.
The participants, the readers, the viewers... these people are not the customers of these companies. They are a resource being mined and sold. Media companies, and entities like Facebook do have customers: Advertisers.
With broadcast, one-way media of yesteryear, these companies had no quality-control on the product they offered. They couldn't deactivate someone's access to a TV station because he or she routinely walked away during commercial breaks. The newspaper company couldn't identify and stop delivering papers to the person who read only the comics and used the rest as bird cage liner. Likewise, these companies could only promise "eyeballs" to their customers. Facebook, on the other hand, is offering "personae" to their customers. Each resource is not merely a potential viewer/listener, but now consists of that and a photograph, a name, a location, an age, interests, lists of friends, education level, and various other biographical data. They're offering a lot more "product" to their real customers now, and so they have a lot more interest in quality control of that product. No advertiser wants to pay for such a premium service as having a viewer's friend's photo appear next to their ad with the declaration that the friend "Liked" that product, when the friend's photo is goatse or Hitler.
Facebook is just being responsive to its customer base. The real question: How should the human users of Facebook understand, quantify, and describe their relationship with Facebook? They're certainly not just "getting to use a free site." Are they employees being paid in a product-use benefit instead of cash? What are their employee rights then? This guy's issue is less of an aggrieved customer situation than it is a wrongful termination suit. There might be analogies that make even more sense. Perhaps it's even possible that these cases be discussed clearly in the realm of what they really are, and the terms will evolve from that, rather than ill-fitting, borrowed terms... Might take a few decades.
Freedom isn't free.
Freedom is definitely not ad supported.
There is nothing that says that the laws of the USA automatically apply to people in other countries. Seriously, we are talking about the Internet here, and in the same way that international spammers are difficult to prosecute due to the laws of one country not necessarily applying to people from other countries, there is nothing that says that someone from another country should be able to use the US court system for a BS lawsuit like this. If anything, the US government should charge the guy for the right to use the US legal system for this stupid claim.
Lots of comments about how suing is evil and hope this guy loses blah blah blah. Anyone ask why this guy got booted? The guy basically has not been told why he was booted. Despite repeated emails all he was told was "you violated our terms of service" which is a nice generic cop out for "out automated processes found something and we don't feel like treating you like a human being to give you any more specifics." It seems like suing to find out why is his only option since Facebook isn't cooperating.
Sure it's a free service, sure it's quite possible that it's not a big deal since it's only a social networking site and little of value will truly be lost. However, Facebook offered it's service for free, the guy used it, and then got booted without discussion. The guy deserves at least some answers, any human being would. And it looks like the only way to get answers is to make it relevant to Facebook that they should be providing them or risk this and other lawsuits. It sounds less frivolous and more like the guy just wants some respect and I think he deserves it. Otherwise we risk other people being treated like this. I urge this man to go go go.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
While $500,000 is ridiculous for compensation from a free service, I do feel he has one valid point: if Facebook has disabled his account for any reason, they should provide it to him and give him some avenue to correct the situation. Even though it's a free service, with over 500 million active users, it's a pretty ubiquitous and universal service. It might not be wise to come to depend on it, but it's certainly understandable how someone would. If Google seemingly arbitrarily disabled your Gmail account (insert free but depended on email service here) would you be as dismissive?
it's becoming increasingly hard to function effectively without a Facebook account
Your job requires you to have such an account? You've got some family member that you must be in contact with, but who doesn't have e-mail and can't take a phone call? You have pictures to store, and can't think of a single other place to put them? You feel the need to publish your status to the world, and can't find a single other way to do it besides using one particular company's free service? Which "function" are you having a hard time performing if you don't sign into Facebook on a given day? Or are you simply unable or unwilling to explain to your friends what it is you'd rather not expose through that venue?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If a utility could be sued for downtime by most of their users, you'd be paying a _lot_ more for your internet and cable.
That's really what it's about.. you are getting cheap internet in exchange for not having a solid service level agreement in place. As I said in my original post, if you want a solid service agreement where they are contractually bound to provide you a certain level of service, and are penalized for breaches of said service.. you can get it.. but not for $30 a month.
Fifty shiftless caftan-clad crofters eftsoon hefted bifteck loftily after their thrifty Lufthansa chieftain.
I suppose that next, he'll say that compound words and suffixes don't count. I don't care. That was fun! And he's an AC.
Advertising and micro-payments are not mutually exclusive.
Examples:
You buy a game (macro-payment) and the greedy developer still shoehorns in obnoxious adverts, even patching them in after release.
You pay for subscription TV which also comes loaded with ads.
If you wish micropayments will replace ads, you'll get both.
A contract, where one party only has to try their best efforts, with no real hard obligations, while the other must pay in cold, hard cash, on time, every month or else doesn't sound exactly fair to me.
So you're against pro sports? :)