Canadians File Class Action Lawsuit Against Facebook For Interception Of Private Messages
by Terry Wilson
Canadian Awareness Network
Apr 11, 2014
Facebook is facing a class-action lawsuit in Canada over its alleged interception of private message of users of the social network.
The lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court alleges that URLs (uniform resource locators) in the private messages were “harvested” by Facebook in violation of its users’ privacy, without their knowledge or consent, Rochon Genova, the law firm representing the users, said Wednesday.
Facebook did not disclose to users that their private messages would be intercepted and scanned, and the contents of those messages treated as “likes” for third-party sites through the social plug-in function, according to the law firm.
The complaint is without merit and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, a spokeswoman for the social networking company said via email.
The company is already facing similar lawsuits in the U.S. over its alleged interception and scanning of the content of private messages.
Citing research by Swiss information security firm High-Tech Bridge and others, Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley filed in December a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of all Facebook users in the U.S. who have sent or received private Facebook messages that included a URL in the content of the message.
High-Tech Bridge wrote in August last year that Facebook was one of the Web services it tested that was caught scanning URLs despite such activity remaining undisclosed to the user, according to the complaint.
Facebook mined user data and profited by sharing the data with third parties such as advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators, despite having made representations that “reflect the promise that only the sender and the recipient or recipients will be privy to the private message’s content, to the exclusion of any other party, including Facebook,” the complaint added.
The lawsuit is proposed to be consolidated with a similar one filed in January in the Northern District of California by another Facebook user David Shadpour. If there was a URL in the private message, Facebook searched the website identified in the URL for purposes such as data mining and user profiling, according to Shadpour’s complaint.
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Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger By Ripping Chat Out Of Its Main Apps
by Josh Constine
TechCrunch
Apr 9, 2014
Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to a new extreme today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile.
Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger app installed had the chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger. But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option anymore.
Notifications about the change are going out to some users in Europe starting today, and they’ll have about two weeks and see multiple alerts before the requirement to download Messenger kicks in. Eventually, all Facebook users will get migrated to this new protocol. And you can bet some users are going to be angry.
The only way to escape the migration is to either have a low-end Android with an OS too old to run Messenger, use Facebook’s mobile web site, or use Facebook’s standalone content reader app Paper.
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[hat tip: Sylvain Henry]
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