A relief for Facebook. Judge rules in favor of Facebook against accusations for privacy violations
There is a major setback for Facebook users who have always been concerned about their privacy and usage of personal information. US District judge Edward Davila, recently ruled in favor of the social media giant, in an old lawsuit filed in Sept 2011 for violating privacy and wiretapping.
Facebook was accused of tracking its user's internet usage even after they had logged out of their accounts. Facebook had assured that logging out would delete the cookies but it continued to receive the user information until disclosed by an independent researcher.
However the judge stated that plaintiffs in the lawsuit have not established that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the electronic addresses of the internet pages they visit. Judge also ruled that Facebook can not be accused of wiretapping as it did not "intercepted" the electronic communication and was itself a party in those communications.
Going forward those plaintiffs can not use the same arguments against Facebook, for wiretapping and privacy violation, however they can file another suite for breach of contract for continuing to track the user's internet activities after logging out.
Facebook does provide Privacy options
Facebook provides privacy features that can be used to restrict access to your contents and personal information. You can block/unfriend users, make posts and pictures private or accessible to a limited audience. The important thing is, if you feel something should not be shared with others do not put it out there, or at least set the required privacy settings. Also be careful with applications that ask you to login through Facebook and access your personal information. Facebook does not share anything with anyone that you don't want it to.
Facebook is a business after all
Facebook provides a platform for millions of users to connect, share memories, pictures, videos, and all of that is for free. To generate revenue Facebook shares its users information with third party companies who are looking to monetize this information. It uses cookies to show targeted ads to the customers to sell services and virtual goods. For example, if you searched for hotels in LA on hotels.com and after 3 hours you opened Facebook. Then it might be possible that you might see an ad on Facebook from Hotels.com with some promotion or an ongoing deal. If you clicked this ad and booked a hotel, then it will generate revenue for both Facebook an Hotels.com.
Facebooks has been under lot of scrutiny due to its privacy policies and the way it encourages people to share information in different ways, but it has also evolved its privacy and security policies over time to define a fine line between monetizing and sharing personal information.
No comments:
Post a Comment