Facebook Privacy Suit Seeks $15 Billion 92
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Facebook may be focusing on their IPO today, but a complaint filed in federal court has given them something else to think about. The filing consolidates 21 separate but similar cases and alleges Facebook invaded users privacy by tracking their browsing behavior even after they had logged out of the site. The claim seeks $15 billion in damages. 'If the claimants are successful in their case against Facebook, they could prevent Menlo Park from collecting the huge amount of data it collects about its users to serve ads back to them. Like the previous lawsuits, Facebook is once again being accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages per user of $100 per day per violation, up to a maximum per user of $10,000. The complaint also asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California Statutes and California common law.'"
Re:Lawsuits for everyone. (Score:5, Informative)
Even if you don't sign up to Facebook, they are tracking you because of their little F icon and/or scripts/cookies are being loaded up by your web browser on any webpage you are visiting.
So your advice is insufficient. The only way to make sure is to nuke them from orbit. i.e. increase the damage and scope of the lawsuit to non-users.
Another typical class action lawsuit (Score:4, Informative)
Damages: $15,000,000,000.00
User compensation: $2,100.00
Lawyer fees: $14,999,997,900.00
Re:Lawsuits for everyone. (Score:5, Informative)
Even if you don't sign up to Facebook, they are tracking you because of their little F icon and/or scripts/cookies are being loaded up by your web browser on any webpage you are visiting.
Nobody says you have to click the little F icon!
Even if you don't click that F icon, they still track you.
Blocking referer on third-party requests helps (and should be mandatory in all decent browsers! (ext for FF [mozilla.org])), but really, unless you adblock all of {facebook,fb,fbcdn}.{com,net} and probably more, Facebook will get a lot of data about you and your browsing patterns even if you don't use it.
Re:Lawsuits for everyone. (Score:3, Informative)
This is a nice analogy, because alligators don't actually stay in the swamp, or any very predictable place aside from usually being near inland water. Now, you could change it to "stay far away from the fucking swamp," and you'd be closer. Problem is, when you go back to the other side of the analogy, that's basically saying, "if you want privacy, stay off the fucking internet," which is becoming less and less of an option in our society.
Just remember that alligators aren't mindless biting machines; they look out for their own safety too, and will avoid attacking potential prey if it's too dangerous. In the same way, Facebook will be more or less intrusive depending on how vigilant we are about calling them out on it. Public scrutiny is dangerous.