Facebook has the opportunity to become something huge… hugely profitable and enormously valuable. Its ad platform was launched with some hiccups… and now comes a potentially greater obstacle: a lawsuit against one of the early adopters of the program. From Mediapost:
A Texas resident has filed a federal lawsuit against Blockbuster for participating in Facebook’s Beacon program, which tells members about their friends’ e-commerce activity. In the lawsuit, quietly filed last week, Dallas County resident Cathryn Elaine Harris claims that 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.
Harris is seeking class-action status, and is asking for at least $2,500 for each violation of the statute, a 1988 law passed after a newspaper obtained the video rental records of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
When Facebook launched Beacon last November, the platform told members about their friends’ e-commerce activity at Blockbuster and other sites. Initially, the program operated by default, meaning that unless members opted out, their rental information was sent to other Facebook users as part of Facebook’s ad program. Harris alleges that this type of ad violated the federal video privacy law.
See our comments on Facebook’s challenge in:
- Why Social Media and Beacon Are Doomed to Fail and What Facebook Should Do.
- Facebook OS: Be Careful What You Ask For.
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