The lawsuit was filed by Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley last year and accuses Facebook of violating the Electronics Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) when the company scanned private messages between uses. The website was apparently seeking links to other websites which they would count and use that information along with the “likes” for those pages to compile shadow user profiles.
These aggregated profiles would then be used to deliver targeted advertising to users.
The practice was revealed to have been stopped in October 2012, but the judge ruled that there was enough evidence of damages for the lawsuit to go on. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of $100 a day for each day Facebook violated each user’s rights under the ECPA and $5,000 or three times the amount of actual damages sustained by each user.
Facebook tried to get the lawsuit thrown out arguing that the company’s activities was permitted under an “exception” to the ECPA because the practice fell within the ordinary course of its business. They failed to convince the judge, however.
It’s not the first “spying scandal” Facebook has had to contend with. Earlier this year, it came to light that Facebook’s mobile messenger app required users to make a substantial amount of personal information available to the company. And in June, the European Union’s highest court started an investigation into whether Facebook illegally let the NSA spy on its European users.
Perhaps ironically, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at the Obama Administration and the NSA in March after it was revealed the US intelligence community had masqueraded as Facebook in order to carry out attacks against targets.
“When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat.”
