Privacy changes mean Facebook now faces lawsuit

At the end of last year social networking site Facebook faced widespread criticism over the change in its privacy settings. Now the site is being sued by five people over those privacy changes. The class action suit has been filed in the US District court for Northern District in California and concerns the privacy changes that Facebook made at the end of last year. The suit has been filed by five Facebook members on their behalf and on behalf of all Facebook users.

While Facebook claims that the privacy changes actually increased the level of privacy for users, the lawsuit claims that the average users privacy is now decreased.

Before the changes users only had to make a single click and then the only information available to those not on their friends list was their name and network. Now much more information is left available to be seen including pictures, friends lists, organisations the user may follow and geographical information.

It's not clear what damages the lawsuit is seeking but it does say of the message that Facebook gave its users about the changes that it was, "misleading, confusing and disingenuous".

The lawsuit says, “Changes to the privacy settings that Facebook implemented and represented to increase User privacy had the outright opposite effect of resulting in the public dissemination of personal information that was originally private."

The lawsuit also says that users now have 29 privacy settings to contend with and that those settings are spread over a number of Web pages and that many users are unaware of what information they have left for people to see. It says, “The privacy setting procedures are grossly ineffective and users are misled into allowing Facebook to having their personal information easily accessed for commercial use, exposing them to identity theft, harassment, embarrassment, intrusion and all types of cybercrime."

When Facebook announced the changes last year they faced concern and criticism from various sources about the potential for users of Facebook to be displaying information to the Web that they were not aware of.

In his Electric Frontier Foundation blog last December, Kevin Bankston wrote: "Our conclusion? These new "privacy" changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."