Facebook Being Sued Over Mining of Private Messages

Kimomaru writes "Two Facebook users are trying to start a class action lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly mining information from private messages with the intention of selling is to advertisers (full complaint PDF). It's not the first time a social medial player has been in the press over privacy or security issues. But when the services are provided free of charge, does the user have a realistic expectation of privacy or security, especially when it's understood that the user's data is being mined for advertising? If not, should social media networks be allowed to use words like 'private' (as in private messaging) or 'security' to describe their services?"

Comments

Re:Really?

[neoform]

If i send a private message to someone on facebook, I feel I deserve the same level of privacy as if I was using gmail to send it.

You are responsible for it.

[grub]

You are responsible for your own privacy. When Facebook or Google mine your data ('you are the product' as people say), you have nothing to fall back on. It's in their ToS which most people agree with because they just HAVE to see their 3rd cousin's dancing cat videos.

Bitching is easy, doing something about it is harder.

Re:You are responsible for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are doing something about it. They are trying to sue Facebook. Do you think it's OK to call a message private in the user interface and then tell people in a wall of text which nobody reads that private messages are not actually private?

Re:Really?

[neoform]

Google doesn't (as far as I know) save that data or send it to 3rd parties. Facebook appears to be creating a profile based on those keywords and using it for yet to be defined purposes.

Contextual ads require context.

If all someone is doing is running a function that looks at keywords then displays a relevant ad, this doesn't both me.

If they collect the keywords, save them to a profile db, then sell that profile to others, that's a far more obvious violation of privacy.

Facebook lied in their privacy policy.

[Animats]

The complaint makes a key point. Facebook lied in their privacy policy. See page 19 of the complaint, "Facebook Fails to Disclose That Its Private Message Processes Read, Acquire, and Use Private Message Content, in Violation of Its Express Agreements With Facebook Users." This looks like a clear ECPA violation.

Re:Really?

[ackthpt]

It's Facebook. Is it reasonable to expect complete privacy with any part of it? Email at least has some expectation of privacy, but even there, the big providers scan your email for targeted advertising.

I really don't think a reasonable person expects a lot of "privacy" at Facebook, certainly "private messages" are only private from other users, not Facebook bots...

If a message is stated as "Private" it should be treated entirely as private. I think that implication would hold up in any court as a reasonable expectation, regardless of how Facebook mines Public or Shared content. Dangerous precedent otherwise.