Facebook Privacy Suit 'A Jumbled Mess'

Facebook makes reasonable efforts to remove accounts of children where there is evidence they are under 13, but it’s not possible to catch every violator of these terms and its attempts to validate the ages of members are consistent with industry practices. While it could be argued that they should be using some type of age-verification technology, an exhaustive investigation of those technologies by the Harvard Berkman Center led Internet Safety Technology Task Force (of which I was a member) determined that such technologies, at the current time, are neither effective nor necessarily desirable.

Once on Facebook, anything a person posts can, by default, be seen only by his friends or people in his network. If Xavier’s profile was available to additional people, it was because he changed his default privacy settings. But, even if he hadn’t, there is always the possibility that a friend or anyone with access to his profile could copy any text or images posted and disseminate them. So of course it’s possible that such information could have been stored, or disseminated. In an e-mail interview, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said, “There are no circumstances under which we would have sold that information.” He further points out that the plaintiffs in the suit “make many assertions about mining data and selling it, but never say who is buying.”

What I find very strange is the statement that the 11-year-old had posted “swimming and/or partially clothed photographs of children ages 5 to 11.” Could they be implying he was posting child pornography images? If so (and I doubt it), this kid could find himself in juvenile court.

Another strange allegation comes from a college student who joined Facebook in 2005 back when it was for college students only. Somehow she is shocked that Facebook is now open to anyone–a change that Facebook made with great fanfare in 2006. If she’s so unhappy about the change, why doesn’t she just close her account?

Santa Clara University Law Professor Eric Goldman told me that he considers the complaint to be “a jumbled mess.” “There is a style of complaint that lists every single possible gripe you have with a company,” he said. “This one listed all sorts of random gripes about Facebook including insignificant items like their acquisition of FriendFeed.” He added, “lawyers sometimes do that, hoping that if you throw those against the wall, the judge will find something that sticks.”