The Maryland resident knew of Facebook's Beacon program, which told Facebook members about their friends' activity at retail sites, but says she thought she had disabled the feature. Nonetheless, by the afternoon of Feb. 5, a friend had noted the activity on McCall's wall: "I see that you have added the X-Files, Season 5, to your Blockbuster queue," the friend wrote, according to new court papers.
Now McCall is objecting to the proposed settlement of a privacy lawsuit stemming from the Beacon program. McCall works as an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed separate criticisms of the settlement, but she is opposing the deal as an individual consumer.
The proposed resolution calls on Facebook to permanently shut down Beacon and contribute $9.5 million to a settlement fund. Around two-thirds of that sum will be used to launch a new privacy foundation, while the remainder will go toward attorneys' fees.
McCall alleges that this deal falls short for several reasons, including that Facebook will have too much control over the foundation. "Under the proposed settlement, the only 'relief' for the class would be a privacy foundation established by Facebook -- an organization whose founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that people no longer care about personal privacy," she argues, referring to Zuckerberg's recent justification for new privacy settings that make a host of information available by default.
The new foundation's initial co-presidents will be Facebook's director of public policy Tim Sparapani and Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's Chris Jay Hoofnagle. Journalist and Internet safety advocate Larry Magid will serve as chief financial officer and secretary.
McCall argues that the foundation is unnecessary because other organizations already advocate for online privacy and because Facebook "retains unwarranted influence" over it.
A Facebook spokesperson said last week that the new foundation "will proactively improve the experience of all Internet users."
McCall also objects to the potential settlement because it does not provide monetary compensation for Facebook members other than the 19 named in the original complaint (who are slated to receive between $1,000 and $15,000 each). McCall says in her motion papers that the program shared information about her Blockbuster queue on at least two occasions. In addition to the February incident, Facebook in January of 2008 allegedly informed her friends that the movie "Untraceable" had been added to her queue.
A federal law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, prohibits companies from sharing information about movie rentals and provides for damages of $2,500 per violation.
"The absence of any monetary relief for class members is telling evidence that the settlement is unfair, unreasonable, and inadequate," she argues in papers filed on her behalf by Philip Friedman, the law firm Chavez & Gertler, and the Public Citizen Litigation Group. (Public Citizen is representing MediaPost in an unrelated matter.)
A separate group of Texas consumers said last year that they objected to the settlement and unsuccessfully moved to intervene in the lawsuit. Lawyers representing those consumers had independently sued Blockbuster for participating in the program.
Facebook launched the Beacon program in November of 2007 on an opt-out basis. Several weeks later, the company changed the program to opt-in and also introduced a feature to allow members to permanently turn Beacon off.
The attorneys who negotiated the potential settlement are expected to file papers defending it by the end of next week. By Wendy Davis from: On line Media
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