Facebook sued over privacy changes

A lawsuit has been filed against Facebook, charging that it modified its privacy settings, reducing rather than increasing, privacy protections. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in the northern district of California. It claimed that Facebook's messages around the changes were "misleading, confusing and disingenuous."

"Changes to the privacy settings that Facebook implemented and represented to increase User privacy had the outright opposite effect of resulting in the public dissemination of personal information that was originally private," the lawsuit said.

But the lawsuit by five Facebook users on behalf of all users said the modifications resulted in more personal data on the Internet, not less. Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told Computerworld in an email that it had informed its users about the changes.

"The announcement and education campaign by Facebook around the changes was unprecedented in its scope. Any recommended changes to a person's privacy settings were clearly shown to them repeatedly and were not implemented until they accepted these changes," Schnitt said.

For more on the lawsuit against Facebook:
- see this Computerworld.com article

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