Social networking giant, Facebook are being sued for monitoring the private messages sent through their network.
A lawsuit has been filed accusing that Facebook gathers information from private message and use it for marketing purposes.
Two plaintiffs have filed the lawsuit in a federal court in San Jose California, on behalf of all users who have sent or received a private message in the past two years, which included a link in it.
They believe that Facebook scans private messages for links to other websites, which they then use for improving their marketing algorithms. The lawsuit also claims that Facebook counts the links as “likes” and use the activity information of the sender for targeting advertisements.
A spokesperson for Facebook has slammed the allegations are “without merit”, and also said "We will defend ourselves vigorously,".
This is not the first time Facebook have been accused of snooping into the contents from private messages. Back in 2012, Hackers News accused them of recording links sent in messages as “likes”.
Facebook were also previously accused of monitoring a user’s activity even after a person has logged out of the social network’s website, by means of browser cookies.
Given its past notoriety when it comes to their user’s privacy, the accusation does not come as a big surprise.
via: LA Times