Facebook To Pay $20 Million As Fine

Reports claim that ‘Sponsored Stories’ breached privacy of users, and thus has to pay $20 million fine. Although, Facebook had settled its privacy suit in 2011, it is about to pay $20 million to a class Action group that claims violation of their privacy through Sponsored Stories program.

According to the terms of the settlement, Facebook will now change the program in order to give more controls to users to let them decide with whom to share their content which according to plantiffs will cost Facebook around $145 million. Facebook’s practice of using a user’s likeness as an advertising tool, displaying the users’ profile image and name alongside a branding page they had ‘Liked’, is the issue behind all this.

Like by a user and then advertising the user’s image is illegal without explicit consent of the user as stated by A California Civil Code, and accordingly the settlement has made it clear that, merely glancing and checking Facebook’s Terms of Service isn’t enough.

Although, some versions will almost certainly survive, it remains to be seen how Facebook will reshuffle the program to abide by with the settlement. Sponsored Stories netted Facebook nearly $234 million, in a span of 19 months since the initial claims.

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