pardon our dust

If you were one of the bazillion people that received an email about Facebook being in a recent settlement, here’s what you should know.

Some sites conspired with a Facebook in-house API called Beacon that allowed third party websites to track your traffic and report it back to Facebook as an item in your feed. Here’s what (from what I understand) would qualify you as a “participant” in this lawsuit:

1. On opening a website or clicking a link “for members,” or really trying to access content of some sort on said website, the website would ask that you log in with your Facebook credentials.
2. If you did so, the website would track your browsing session and report it back to Facebook as an item that would enter into your feed. “John Doe looked at ________ on www.oursite.com!” kinds of things.
3. Once your browsing session was logged and sent to Facebook, the next time you logged on to Facebook you would be asked if you would like to publish said session to your feed. If you said yes or clicked out of the dialog, it would publish to your feed by default. If you said no, the item would be queued to publish with the next log you accepted or published, resulting in multiple instances of the same site publishing directly to your Facebook feed.

The class-action lawsuit states that this is illegal — something about aggressive advertising through means of hijacking people’s Facebook accounts, I’m sure. I believe this system was what Mafia Wars, Farmville, and other third-party Facebook games implemented: you know, those games that spam yours and everyone else’s Live Feeds at all hours. If that’s the case, I can see why there’s been a lawsuit against it — God knows I can’t remember the last time I logged on to Facebook and didn’t see what my friends were doing on their farm or in their cafe or in whatever timesink flash game they were playing.

Facebook believes they’ve done nothing wrong here — it’s part of their well-trusted, well-protected API. The plaintiffs beg to differ, hence this lawsuit. The email sent out to the masses is a notification that, if the lawsuit reaches the point where Facebook must settle, Facebook will donate ~$9M to a charitable fund or some kind. Which means:

*drumroll please*

The end user aka you, whether you are included in the lawsuit or not, gets nothing. No payouts, no reparations, no compensation for damages, nothing.

Sorry. :(