Facebook Facing Lawsuit Over Unauthorized Message Scanning

Facebook scanning the contents of your private messages? How can this be? It's totally unlike them to do something like that.

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. The complaint alleged that the scanning of the private messages violated the federal and California state law.

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Steve said:

Facebook scanning the contents of your private messages? How can this be? It's totally unlike them to do something like that.

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Rape has been Facebook's business model from the start. Although in this case both senders and recipients are Facebook subscribers, so I'm not sure if it's even possible to legally claim this email is private. I can't imagine the company would have routinely broken its own terms of service.

The lawsuits I'm waiting for are the ones against Comcast (for forcibly modifying email headers sent through their network and not between customers), and the ones against Google for their errant DMCA takedowns. The sooner the DMCA is repealed or sued out of existence the sooner the world can get on with the new century.

A message thru Facebook to another Facebook user? That's like handing someone a note to pass to someone else. Ya it's douchy to read it but you took that risk.