Facebook Gets Hit With Class-Action Lawsuit

It was bound to happen eventually. MediaPost is reporting that 19 Facebook members have filed a lawsuit against the company for privacy violations as a result of the much-maligned Beacon ad program, which automatically told their friends about their e-commerce activity:

“The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Jose, Calif., alleges that the Beacon program violated various federal and California laws regulating privacy and computer crime.” The report said that the class-action lawsuit named the marketers that participated in the program as defendants, including Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, STA Travel, Overstock.com, Zappos.com and Gamefly.

In the suit, the plaintiffs allege that Beacon’s opt-out mechanism did not adequately protect privacy. “It was inadequate because, on most Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate websites, where it was operational at all, it was only available as a quick pop-up for approximately 10 seconds or even less, and if a user missed it, misunderstood it, had another window browser open, or even looked in the wrong direction when it was momentarily available, such actions and a host of other similar non-consensual occurrences were all interpreted as and defaulted to ‘consent,’” according to the lawsuit’s allegations.

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