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Famous For Fifteen People: Is Everyone a 'Facebook Celebrity'?
An anonymous reader writes "In the Stanford Law Review Online, authors Frankel, Brookover & Satterfield discuss an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook where plaintiffs claimed the social network's 'Sponsored Stories,' displaying advertisements on Facebook including 'the names and pictures of users who have "Liked" a product,' violated the law. Facebook responded by asserting that '(1) Plaintiffs are "public figures" to their friends, and (2) "expressions of consumer opinion" are generally newsworthy.' The authors discuss the substantial impact this case might have on online privacy going forward: 'The implications are significant and potentially far-reaching. The notion that every person is famous to his or her "friends" would effectively convert recognizable figures within any community or sphere, however small, into individuals whose lives may be fair game for the ever-expanding (social) media. If courts are willing to find that nontraditional subjects (such as Facebook users) are public figures in novel contexts (such as social media websites), First Amendment and newsworthiness protections likely will become more vigorous as individual privacy rights weaken. Warren and Brandeis's model of privacy rights, intended to prevent media attention to all but the most public figures, will have little application to all but the most private individuals.'"
It's even more complicated than the botched summary makes it out to be.
The *plaintiff* was the one to claim that they were famous to their friends (in which case they felt as a celebrity endorsing a product they deserved compensation). Facebook basically argued if they were famous to their friends, then their public expression of a consumer opinion was "newsworthy", in which case the use of their likeness was fair use protected by the First Amendment.
Basically, a bullshit answer to a bullshit lawsuit...
Thank you. When Facebook got rid of groups/interests and converted all of them to likes, I opted to remove all of that information from my profile because I couldn't find that privacy option. Nice to know it exists now.
They removed it to make an end run around the legal system. They could legally sell "public" stuff, so they made any new interests public, and forced everyone to reenter or remove them, thus converting everything to public, and they were able to sell them all.
Because "Like" for Facebook pages doesn't mean what it sounds like. "Follow" (which is what Google+ and Twitter call the same concept) would be more accurate.