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Facebook Sued For Violating Wiretap Laws
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is being sued in multiple states for tracking its users even after they logged out of the service. All the lawsuits allege the company violated federal wiretap laws. The most recent lawsuit, filed by a Mississippi woman, says: 'Leading up to September 23, 2011, Facebook tracked, collected, and stored its users’ wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to portions of their internet browsing history even when the users were not logged-in to Facebook. Plaintiff did not give consent or otherwise authorize Facebook to intercept, track, collect, and store her wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to her internet browsing history when not logged-in to Facebook.'"
Put a "Like" button on every page they visit and store the Referrer field when the button gets downloaded.
If new laws are needed to cover emerging technologies, they should be considered by appropriate legislative and regulatory bodies. Then people can comply with the law or face the consequences. But if laws can be twisted to cover any behavior we don't like, it makes it difficult for anyone to be sure they are in compliance with the law.
But how can you know if a new law is required to cover a new technology without a judicial test of the existing laws? That is what the courts are designed to do: test and apply the laws to a given situation. Let this go to trial. If the courts shoot down the lawsuit due to these laws not applying, then you can go ahead and get new legislation passed.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
With the consent of certain websites, the cookie mechanism is used to inform Facebook when users visit these sites.
Is that true? Did the website operators displaying a Facebook "like" button actually know that it allowed their site users to be tracked by Facebook even if the button was not clicked? The tech-savvy ones might have realized that that was a possibility, but I would guess that a lot of website operators put the button on their pages to allow their users to "like" a page, not for the purpose of allowing Facebook to track them. Car analogy: If I give my car keys to a mechanic to change the car's oil, that doesn't mean I've consented to having him install a GPS tracker so he can monitor me.
That is correct as far as it goes. But the problem there is that you have no way to know, ahead of time, what sites might have Like buttons and what sites not. By the time the page is downloaded, and you see the Like button there, it already has you tracked.
Currently, the only way to prevent that is to use a script blocker to block Facebook's javascript from running. Which I do. But it's not a satisfactory solution... they should only be able to track you if you give your explicit permission. What they are doing now is sneaky and unethical, given that most people don't even know they're doing it.
"The user is intentionally using software that sends tracking information (cookies) to Facebook"
No, that is not the case at all. If it were, this would be a different story.
We're talking here about third-party cookies. These are images that come from servers OTHER THAN the one you are visiting. But when that image is downloaded from that foreign server, it gets a record of your ip and what the referring domain is.
The issue here is that while you can control what websites you visit, you have no control over what image bugs or javascript they install on their site, nor is there any way to tell in advance what they are. So you aren't voluntarily doing anything at all; in fact most of the time you probably don't even know it is happening. That does not fit the definition of "intentional". On the contrary; it is downright sneaky.
Tracking bugs like that are completely unethical, and if they are not in fact illegal they should be.