A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.
A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had not yet actually been served with the lawsuit, and that its legal team consequently did not have a formal statement at the time. STA Travel, Gamefly, and Overstock all declined to comment; none of the other defendants could be immediately reached.
"Until we're served, we're not being sued, so we don't have any comment," Overstock general counsel Mark Griffin told CNET News.
Beacon gained almost immediate notoriety when Facebook unveiled it as part of its Facebook Ads announcement last fall. Privacy advocates, most notably liberal activist group MoveOn.org, lambasted the program for not allowing users to disable it easily. Facebook has since modified the program and the controversy has wound down. But in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs point to the window of time before Facebook instituted the new controls--between November 7 and December 5 of last year--and claims that the social network still has access to a large amount of user data that was gathered in that period.
"If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate," the filing for Lane et al v. Facebook, Inc. read. "Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site--one which was not open or active in the user's browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of."
There's one odd law that may make the plaintiffs' case stronger: the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. The law was passed amid the fracas surrounding Robert Bork's controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, when a journalist obtained Bork's movie rental record from a local video store and published it.
That's why there's already been a suit involving Beacon that specifically targeted Blockbuster for participating in such a program: a Texas woman filed suit against Blockbuster in April, claiming that the VPPA bars it from Beacon. Facebook was not named as a defendant in that suit, and though the plaintiff sought class action status for her case, she does not appear to have any involvement in this week's suit.
The defendants named in the suit don't encompass all of Facebook's original Beacon partners, but several of them could tie into VPPA protections: GameFly rents video games, Fandango sells movie tickets, Hotwire and STA deal with travel bookings, and Zappos and Overstock are both online retailers with a large scope (Overstock sells DVDs, for example). The suit also names the California Computer Crime Law and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act as grounds for the suit.
One of the plaintiffs, Sean Lane of Waltham, Mass., was immortalized in a Washington Post story about Beacon: He's the guy who bought his wife a diamond ring on Overstock.com, only to have her spot the purchase in a Facebook news feed, spoiling the surprise.
Guess he's still irritated.
As if troubled movie rental company Blockbuster didn't have enough to deal with already: an angry Facebook user has taken issue with its participation in the social network's controversial Beacon advertising program, and is pursuing legal action.
Cathryn Elaine Harris, a Texas resident, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for eastern Texas on April 9, claiming that it's a violation of a federal statute for Blockbuster to participate in Beacon, which shares rental history on Facebook members' "news feeds" unless they manually opt out. She is seeking class-action status, hoping to eventually net $2,500 for each infringement.
Don't want anyone to know you rented this cinematic gem? One lawsuit in Texas says it feels your pain.
(Credit: New Line Cinema)Facebook is not included in the lawsuit.
In the suit, Harris claims that Blockbuster's sharing of her movie rental history through Beacon is in direct conflict with the Videotape Privacy Protection Act. The law was passed during the viciously contested nomination of judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, in the midst of which writer Michael Dolan went to a video store that Bork frequented and obtained a list of 146 videotapes his family had checked out.
Then Dolan reported on the not particularly scandalous list--no Debbie Does Dallas to be found--in an article in the Washington, D.C.-area City Paper. An analog-age privacy debate ensued, and the VPPA was passed in 1988.
Now, the Bork-era law has taken on a digital dimension: Harris vs. Blockbuster, addressing Facebook's "social advertising" program. The social network unveiled the Beacon ads in November, drawing criticism from activist groups like MoveOn.org for privacy violations until it modified the interface to allow for more user control.
A Blockbuster representative told MediaPost that adequate privacy protections are in place and that Blockbuster's legal team will "vigorously defend the company in this litigation."
Correction, Sept. 23, 2009: Michael Dolan has clarified that while he obtained and reported on Robert Bork's household's video rental history, he did not actually publish the list.
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