lawsuit accusing it of violating users' privacy by scanning the
content of messages they send to other users for advertising purposes.
Reuterscover the proceedings:
U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, on
Tuesday dismissed some state-law claims against the social media
company but largely denied Facebook's bid to dismiss the lawsuit.
Facebook had argued that the alleged scanning of its users' messages
was covered by an exception under the federal Electronic
Communications Privacy Act for interceptions by service providers
occurring in the ordinary course of business.
But Hamilton said Facebook had "not offered a sufficient explanation
of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary course of its
business." Neither Facebook nor a lawyer for the plaintiffs responded
to a request for comment Wednesday.
The lawsuit, filed in 2013, alleged that Facebook scanned the content
of private messages sent between users for links to websites and would
then count any links in a tally of "likes" of the pages. Those "likes"
were then used to compile user profiles, which were then used for
delivering targeted advertising to its users, the lawsuit said.
No comments:
Post a Comment