A group of consumer and children’s advocates are renewing their legal battle with Facebook over teenagers’ privacy on the world’s largest online social network.
At issue is how the company uses the vast trove of information that its 1.23billion users share on the site. Facebook faced a class action lawsuit in 2011 over its use of people’s images in advertisements known as “sponsored stories”. This allowed companies to pay to retransmit users’ activities to their friends’ pages.
If someone clicked the “like” button for a brand, the click could show up as a “sponsored story” on friends’ pages.
To settle the lawsuit, Facebook agreed to pay $20million to users and in charitable contributions and make changes to its privacy policies.
Yesterday the non-profit Public Citizen, along with six parents of teenagers, filed a legal brief in a federal appeals court in California saying the settlement should be rejected.
Public Citizen and supporting groups, such as the Centre for Digital Democracy, argue that the settlement should have not been approved because using minors’ images in ads without parental consent violates the law in seven US states.
