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Solidarity

 

The Fight Continues: Facebook Sued for Violating Privacy of Users With "Beacon" Program

rkamens's picture
Submitted by rkamens on Wed, 2008-08-13 18:09.

I was notified today that a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook today for their Beacon program. The defendants in the suit are Facebook and advertisers who used their Beacon program such as Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, Overstock, Zappos, Gamefly, and 40 "doe" corporations. Earlier this year, Binary Freedom helped lead a successful campaign to stop Beacon. In the end, several advertisers dropped Beacon due to public pressure. The Beacon program was a clear violation of Facebook's privacy policy and automatically shared user information with advertisers as well as telling a user's friends on facebook what they were looking at/buying online. This obviously has huge privacy implications.

Initially, the Beacon program was enabled by default and a user could not disable it. This presented a serious concern because most users do not know how to clear their cookies after they leave Facebook, leaving them open to major privacy violations. Later on, Facebook allowed users to opt-out of this feature on a site-by-site basis, however this was not enough because in order for a site to be "opt-out-able", a user had to visit it first and have their privacy violated. Unsatisfied, Binary Freedom members and thousands of other Facebook members continued their fight with Facebook and eventually gained a universal opt-out ability.

Regardless, during this time of struggle, thousands if not millions of users had their privacy violated and luckily, some people have stepped up to do something about it.

Among other things, the suit (correctly) alleges that the average Facebook user was mislead about how Facebook handled their information and that Facebook violated accepted privacy standards. The suit also alleges that a user would have to read 37 pages or 27,000 words to fully understand the Beacon program. The suit asks for a injunction to stop the Facebook Beacon program, for Facebook to pay all profits derived from Beacon to those who had their privacy violated, and for the defendants to delete all personal information that was improperly gathered through Beacon. According to the suit, Facebook and its advertisers who participated in the Beacon program violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, California's Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and California's Computer Crime Law.

This suit reinforces that companies are accountable to users and the privacy policies which they set. A copy of the suit is available at Handbook Revolutionary.

In Solidarity,
Ringo Kamens of Binary Freedom

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