Social networking giant Facebook is being sued by five of its users in a civil lawsuit, with the group claiming the site violated California privacy laws and misled its members about how their personal information was being used.
The lawsuit comes after both the Canadian and Australian privacy commissioners have questioned Facebook’s privacy policies, saying they will monitor the site’s actions.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the Orange County Superior Court, alleges that Facebook violated privacy laws by distributing personal information posted by users to third parties.
The group of five – which includes a professional photographer, two children aged under 13, a user who claims she joined Facebook during its Harvard University-only days and an actress – also claim that Facebook engaged in “data mining and harvesting” without disclosing any of those practices to the affected members.
“Plaintiffs and the general public desire and expect a level of privacy, which Facebook has failed to satisfy under its current policies, procedures, practices, and technology,” the lawsuit reads, but each person is suing Facebook for different reasons.
The parents of the children involved claim they are concerned about personal information which was uploaded to the site, including photographs and a status update from one child that claimed he had contracted swine flu, and are unsure about how that information will be used by Facebook.
Both the actress and photographer claim their images were distributed by Facebook without their “consent, knowledge, or compensation”.
Additionally, the member who claims to be an original user of the service when it was only available to Harvard students claims the site has changed its terms and conditions and user interface without any consent from its members.
The lawsuit also claims that “Facebook’s Web site incorporates various features many of which provide detailed deep specific data to each individual, information that is highly valuable to Facebook and to third parties”.
But Facebook has dismissed the lawsuit, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling AP that “We see no merit to this suit and we plan to fight it”.
The lawsuit comes after Facebook has attempted to increase the amount of control its users have over their privacy details, enabling users to block whether certain people can see their personal information and photographs.
Last month, Facebook announced it is testing a tiered level of privacy options including “all of your friends, your friends and people in your school or work networks and friends of friends”.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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