Facebook wins dismissal of $15-bn privacy suit by users

A US district court gave the plaintiffs until Nov 30 to revise their claims, including invasion of privacy

Facebook has won dismissal of a $15-billion lawsuit that accused the company of secretly tracking the internet activity of its users after they logged off.

On Friday, US district judge Edward J Davila in San Jose, California, agreed with Facebook's argument that the case should be dismissed because subscribers didn't specify how they were harmed. The judge, who took more than three years to issue a ruling on the matter, said users could re-file most of their claims in a revised lawsuit.

In a 2012 complaint, Facebook users alleged while they might have agreed to the company's installation of 'cookie' files on their computers to track and transmit their web browsing activity, they didn't give consent to such monitoring after logging out of the social network. The lawsuit consolidated similar complaints filed on behalf of US residents who subscribed to Facebook from May 2010 to September 2011 in 10 states, including California, Texas and Alabama.

Facebook, the world's most popular social networking service, has been scrutinised by regulators in the US and Europe over how it uses subscribers' private information. The company has also been hit with multiple privacy lawsuits, from a complaint that it scans users' private e-mail messages for targeted advertising to a claim that its use of facial-recognition technology has "amassed the world's largest privately held database of consumer biometric data".

In the San Jose case, the plaintiffs accused Facebook of violating the US Wiretap Act by monitoring their online activity while they weren't logged on. They also accused the company of improperly profiting from their information.

The judge, however, said the users failed to "adequately connect" the value of the data collected by Facebook "to a realistic economic harm or loss". Specifically, the plaintiffs failed to show "they personally lost the opportunity to sell their information or that the value of their information was somehow diminished after it was collected by Facebook", Davila said.

The judge gave the plaintiffs until November 30 to revise their claims, including invasion of privacy and alleged violations of the Wiretap Act, which provides for damages of as much as $100 a violation, a day for each user. Based on an estimate of 150 million affected users, the plaintiffs calculated potential damages of $15 billion.

"We are pleased with the court's ruling," Vanessa Chan, a Facebook spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

Three lawyers for the plaintiffs didn't immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment on the ruling.

Matthew Brown, a lawyer who represented Facebook at a 2012 hearing before Davila, told the judge the users' complaint suffered from an "utter lack of allegations of any injury to the plaintiffs". Brown argued the plaintiffs failed to identify the websites they visited, what kind of data or information was collected or whether Facebook used it or disclosed it to anyone else.