Wendy Davis writes:
Facebook has been hit with two new potential class-action lawsuits stemming from recent revisions to its privacy settings.
The cases, filed in federal district court in San Jose, Calif. on behalf of nine Facebook users, allege that the new settings decreased users’ privacy and “resulted in wider access to personal information that users had included in their profiles,” according to court papers submitted on Wednesday by Facebook.
Late last year, Facebook sparked controversy by classifying a host of data as “publicly available information” — including users’ names, profile pictures, cities, networks, lists of friends and pages that people are fans of. Facebook also changed the default settings for many users to share-everything, spurring criticism that users who reviewed their settings quickly and accepted the defaults might inadvertently share more than they had intended.
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The consumers in the most recent lawsuits allege that Facebook’s new settings violate California’s business code as well as their “right of publicity,” or right to control the commercial use of their images, according to Facebook’s papers.
Read more on MediaPost.
One of the cases is Silvestri v. Facebook, 5:10-cv-00429-JF. The other case is Markowitz v. Facebook, 5:10-cv-00430-JF. Both lawsuits were filed in January.