A Class Action Privacy Lawsuit Against Facebook

The methodology is called “behavioural advertising”. The more that an advertiser knows about you means there is greater chance that advertising focused on your interests will be successful. On the internet, that means tracking where you go and what you do. It is monitoring your browsing habits. And advertisers will justify the behaviour as being beneficial to you because it makes for a relevant internet experience… and one that is a bit more creepy too.

For many internet users, the tracking of online behaviour is unauthorized surveillance. There are implications of invasion of privacy and it raises security issues. Facebook used such a paradigm with its Beacon program and now it has a class action lawsuit on its hands:

“Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, is facing a class action lawsuit charging that its controversial advertising program violated online privacy and computer fraud laws.”

link: Suit says Facebook ad program invaded privacy

There will be a segment of the internet community that will minimize the importance of such litigation. For them, this is a meaningless because they will argue that they have “nothing to hide” and that they do not do anything online that they need to conceal.

That is not the point.

A real life analogy would be that someone looks in your snail mail to see what your interests are. Then advertising is served to you to match those interests. Your weekly trash is inspected to see what is being used in the household. And then suitable advertising is served to match your buying preferences. Your purchases at the pharmacy are monitored to see what over the counter medication or prescribed drugs are being used. Then relevant drug advertising is presented with the intent of helping you make wise purchasing decisions.

The analogy can continue. However, the salient point to remember is that this is done without your permission. Even the “nothing to hide” segment of the population might find such monitoring to be somewhat unsettling - and perhaps just plain creepy.

Catherine Forsythe