There’s been a lot of buzz online and in the mainstream media about Facebook’s increasingly serious invasion of its users’ privacy in support of private profit — even spurring massive Facebook “groups” urging the social networking site to relent.
Local Attorney Peter Wasylyk — for whom I’m working — has just filed what we believe to be the first lawsuit of its kind in the country, over so-called “Instant Personalization,” which shares users’ data, frequently without their knowledge, with third-party websites like Pandora.
More info follows. (Below’s some of the press release — read the full release and the complaint over here.)
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Derrick Rose of East Providence, Rhode Island has announced today that he has filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook over privacy concerns relating to Facebook’s “Instant Personalization,” a social network tool that allows third party websites to access users’ personal information when users visit on third party websites.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, alleges that Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” feature has violated users’ privacy rights and seeks to certify a national class of Facebook users.
“The activation of Instant Personalization and the sharing of information about users with unrelated third party websites violated users reasonable expectations of privacy ”, the lawsuit claims.
“Social networking sites like Facebook are continuing to put profits over privacy and users are demanding control over the use of their personal information on the internet”, said Attorney Peter N. Wasylyk, Mr. Rose’s attorney.
Frivolous lawsuit. People who expect privacy from a free product like Facebook are about as intelligent as people who think they actually got an inheritance from a Nigerian prince. Sounds like this guy put too much info on Facebook and got burned. As the old saying goes “if you don’t want the world to know it, don’t put it on the internet.”