Facebook sued for sharing data from private messages

The social network Facebook has been accused of intercepting confidential communications to search user data for information helpful to advertisers, data brokers and others.

A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California on Dec. 30 states Facebook scanned user messages that contained links and visited those links for "purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling.”

The plaintiffs allege these actions violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy laws.

The complaint cites recent research to support the allegations. Swiss firm High-Tech Bridge, for example, reported in August it used a dedicated Web server to generate fake links to test on each of the 50 largest social networks, Web services and free email systems.

The researchers embedded their bogus links in private messages on each of the services and monitored their server logs to see whether any of the services would click on the links, or URLs.

"Facebook was one of the Web Services that was caught scanning URLs despite such activity remaining undisclosed to the user," according to the complaint.

The lawsuit was filed by Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley on behalf of all U.S. users who have sent or received private Facebook messages that included a URL in the content of the message.

"We believe the allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously," Facebook said in an emailed statement.

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