14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook and Zynga have both shaken off wiretapping allegations and defeated class action lawsuits in the process.
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the advertising practices targeted by the lawsuits did not involve wiretapping. Facebook is not out of the woods just yet, as the court reinstated allegations that Facebook had been violating its own terms of service.
According to the case, the two companies were accused of disclosing user data to advertisers without explicit permission to do so. This happened when ads on Facebook and Zynga games were clicked on the social network. Allegations indicate that the Facebook page addresses and Facebook IDs were collected and disclosed to advertisers.
While the decision hasn’t been made on whether the two companies are guilty or not, the actions they’re being accused of do not register as wiretapping under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which makes it illegal to disclose the particular contents of a communication, which didn’t happen in this situation.
The plaintiffs allege that Facebook, Inc., a social networking company, and Zynga Game Network, Inc., a social gaming company, disclosed confidential user information to third parties. “We have consolidated these cases for this opinion and conclude that the plaintiffs in both cases have failed to state a claim because they did not allege that either Facebook or Zynga disclosed the ‘contents’ of a communication, a necessary element of their ECPA claims,” reads the court decision.
The new decision falls in line with one taken in a previous case by US District Judge James Ware in California. Back in 2011, he tossed similar wiretapping allegations, saying that the referrer headers were used to link users to advertisers, but not to store or process any data.
“The referrer header information that Facebook and Zynga transmitted to third parties included the user’s Facebook ID and the address of the webpage from which the user’s HTTP request to view another webpage was sent. This information does not meet the definition of ‘contents,’ because these pieces of information are not the ‘substance, purport, or meaning’ of a communication,” the new decision mentions on the topic.
This is not the first time and certainly won’t be the last when Facebook is dragged into court over this issue, which is probably becoming tiresome for the company. Regardless, the FTC will be keeping an eye on Facebook’s privacy practices for the next couple of decades, so users should feel a tad safer.