Media Post has written, “A Texas resident has filed a federal lawsuit against Blockbuster for participating in Facebook’s Beacon program.” According to the suit, “Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without first obtaining her written consent.”
In the country with the most law suits in the world, it comes as no surprise that Facebook has been involved one way or another in some sort of legal issues over the past few months. Given that Facebook’s site has substantial privacy implications, I’m guessing that they will continue to be involved in legal issues and end up employing an entire team of full-time legal advisors. The complainant is seeking “$2,500 for each violation of the statute.”
There is no word on how many violations have occurred but this is a class-action suit so every time that blockbuster user data is being used would be included. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch should be part of the suit as I have seen him in my newsfeed plenty of times promoting one video or another. While this is the first Beacon related suit, I’d imagine that we will see more to follow as the program has already been a center for controversy since its launch.
According to the article, Facebook is not commenting on the suit.
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[...] faces on ads within the social network. Just last week, their decision to do so resulted in a lawsuit for Blockbuster. Facebook has just taken their policy one step further by leveraging users to promote their own [...]
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