Popular social media platform, Facebook is at the center of lawsuits filed by two users who are suing the company for using their private messages for advertising purposes. The users said the Silicon Valley Company violated federal and state laws by mining private information.
The cases are now proceeding in Northern District of California’s federal district court which covers Silicon Valley.
According to Bloomberg, there is confusion over what is private on Facebook and has caused controversy for years.
The lawsuit filed this week argues that Facebook is lying to its users by describing certain messages as private. It accused the company of scanning URLs contained in private messages and using them to build profiles about a user’s Web activity.
“The complaint charges that this is a particularly pernicious form of snooping, because the things people reveal in private messages are exactly what they don’t want distributed widely,” Bloomberg said.
However, a spokesperson for Facebook has described the lawsuit as lacking merit. The rep said the company will defend itself but will first examine the specific allegations before responding to them directly.
Millions of Nigerians are currently using the popular social media platform. The verdict in these two cases could have impact on the platform’s privacy statement that users must agree to before using the platform.
