Graphic by Pixabay; illustration by CNET
Facebook on Wednesday reportedly argued that it didn't violate users' privacy rights because there's no expectation of privacy when using social media.
"There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy," Facebook counsel Orin Snyder said during a pretrial hearing to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to Law 360.
The company reportedly didn't deny that third parties accessed users' data, but it instead told US District Judge Vince Chhabria that there's no "reasonable expectation of privacy" on Facebook or any other social media site.
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The social network's legal argument comes as the world's largest social network is more publicly trying to convince people that it knows how to protect their personal information. Earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said she and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will do "whatever it takes" to keep people safe on Facebook.
Calls to curtail Zuckerberg's control over Facebook have escalated as the company continues to be plagued by problems, including issues around data privacy and security. Facebook is expecting to face a record $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for its alleged failure to protect user privacy.
The company's data-handling practices have been called into question in the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, during which personal information on up to 87 million Facebook users was improperly accessed.
Chhabria appears set on letting at least some of the lawsuit continue, saying in an order before the hearing (PDF) that the plaintiffs should expect the court to accept their argument that private information was disclosed without express consent.
netsettler on June 1st, 2019 at 14:24 UTC »
There is periodic discussion in the long-running societal discussion on privacy about how the whole notion of "expectation of privacy" is a moving target because every time there's a gross violation, a side-effect is that expectation is eroded.
So if you hang your rights on the question of what is expected, or you make your political arguments on the basis of what is expected, rather than some objective standard, then people are indeed bound to lose those rights. But that doesn't make it right. It just means the forces of "I want to there to be no privacy." have undue advantage.
And it is all the more reason for stronger counterbalancing forces to be enshrined in strongly enforced law. Government should work for the people, not for the ratcheting power of the market, whose only goal is to relentlessly squeeze more bucks out of people as if they were a consumable resource.
Mulcyber on June 1st, 2019 at 11:51 UTC »
"People don't trust us so we can be as shitty as we want !", FB 2019
WigglestonTheFourth on June 1st, 2019 at 11:46 UTC »
"Company with privacy controls says there is no expectation of privacy."