Facebook was hit by yet another privacy
scandal when two US users sued the social network for allegedly scanning their
private messages.
Facebook has denied the accusation,
saying that the case was “without merit” and that it will fight the allegations
“vigorously”.
The complaint was filed following
research by security firm High-Tech Bridge (www.htbridge.com),
which
last year examined several online services to find out if they scanned URLs.
The practice is common for browsers and security software, which check to see
if there is malware present at linked websites so they can warn users to be
wary about clicking those links.
According to claims made in the
lawsuit, Facebook does not look at the messages for technical reasons such as
security or to ensure they are sent properly, but “mines user data and profits
from those data [sic] by sharing them with third parties”.
The implication is that Facebook wants
to know which websites users share in their private messages in order to serve behavioural advertising. A separate research study last year showed Facebook
counted the mention of a web page as a ‘Like’ - even if it was
contained in a private message.
The claimants are asking for $100
(about £61) a day for each incident, or $10,000 in total. Because the lawsuit
is a ‘class-action’ one, it could theoretically cover all Facebook users.
How will it affect
you?
If you use Facebook, don’t assume that
any message you send privately over the system is genuinely private. Regardless
of the reason, the social-networking site could be looking at your URLs.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that this is already done by Gmail.
Google automatically scans the entire
content of your emails -
not
only the links and uses its findings to display advertising around your
messages.
What do we think?
We think that the main difference
between Facebook and Google’s scanning practices, if the allegations are indeed
correct, is that the latter is upfront about “reading” your messages, while
Facebook is not. We’ll have to wait for the outcome of the case to know what’s
really happening, but this lawsuit is a good reminder that if you’re not paying
money for an online service, you’re likely paying in another way with your
privacy.
