The Money Quote in the Beacon Lawsuit

Just in case Mr. Zuckerberg thought the whole Beacon debacle was behind him, there's a news of a class action lawsuit today. Maybe it's me, but the allegations don't seem too harsh: It alleges that Facebook stored some data that people may or may not have wanted stored for less than a month, until it changed the system. It wants the data deleted and "ill gotten gains" returned. I'm not exactly sure how the plaintiffs think Facebook monetized a month of data, when most people criticize the company for not thinking about monetization enough. But the money quote (so to speak) is here:

"The class purports to represent all Facebook members who during that period visited any of the Beacon affiliate Web pages    and did something that would trigger Beacon to send a message to Facebook. The suit estimates there are tens of thousands    of people affected."

That's right, tens of thousands of people out of the 30 million or so Facebook users at the time. (Going from memory here...it might have been even higher then.) For anyone who still thought the Beacon outrage was user generated-- and not MoveOn.org/press generated-- there's your proof that the vast majority were never even affected by the whole to-do.

Comments

[Jennifer]

The money part will be simple to compute. The lawsuit alleges they violated federal statutes that each have a monetary amount for damages. e.g. VPPA has a liquidated damages in an amount of $2,500 PER VIOLATION. ALOT OF MONEY, even if ONLY tens of thousands were affected.

[sarah lacy]

oh i have no doubt they're SEEKING a lot of money or they wouldn't have brought a class action lawsuit. my question (and point) was around the idea of returning spoils from these "ill gotten gains." ie, how they think facebook monetized that small amount of data in less than a month. seems an incredible stretch. and for facebook's footprint, tens of thousands is NOTHING no matter how you slice it.