Wichita: A Facebook user has filed a federal lawsuit against the social networking giant, claiming it violated wiretap laws with a tracking cookie that records web browsing history after logging off of Facebook.
John Graham, a 42-year-old lawyer, is the named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed on Wednesday in US District Court in Kansas. His suit seeks class action status for the 150 million users of Facebook in the United States. Graham referred all comment to his attorneys, who declined to comment on the filing. Experts say the Kansas litigation faces an uphill battle since courts in the past have tossed out similar cases against Facebook and others filed under wiretap law, finding such computer cookies are not wiretaps.
In those cases that do end up being litigated the plaintiffs typically lose because they cannot prove any harm. Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Facebook, said the firm was not commenting on the lawsuit at this time. But when the controversy over the cookies was initially raised, the company issued a statement saying there was no security or privacy breach and Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have.
Like every site on the Internet that personalises content and tries to provide security for its user, Facebook places cookies on the computer of the user, it said. "Three of these cookies on some users' computers inadvertently included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook," according to the statement. "However, we did not store these identifiers for logged out users. Therefore, we could not have used this information for tracking or any other purpose."
Graham asks the federal court to decide whether the interception was intentional, the extent of communications intercepted and stored, and whether the court should prohibit Facebook from intercepting such communications when a user is not logged in.
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