Charities Benefit By $10 Million From Facebook’s ‘Like’ Privacy Blunder

It’s nice to see that when a big company screws up, they don’t always get away with it, leaving the little guy worse off. In this case, charities are to benefit from Facebook’s ‘Like’ privacy blunder – to the tune of $10 million. Facebook had been using people’s ‘Likes’ against commercial products to turn them into so-called “sponsored stories”, since these can have up to three times the value to the advertiser of a regular Facebook ad. These make it look like those users are endorsing these products, when they actually haven’t and was done without permission or opt-out options. Unsurprisingly, many people don’t like this (no pun intended) including five from California, who filed a class-action lawsuit in San Jose California, against Facebook, citing privacy issues. If won, this lawsuit could have run into billions of dollars in damages against Facebook, as around one in three Americans would have had a claim. To avoid this possibility, Facebook settled last month, with the details only just having become available this weekend.

The settlement arrangement is known as a cy-pres settlement, meaning the settlement funds can go to charity and making for a very nice outcome with worthy causes benefiting substantially from this fiasco.