Facebook Sued Over Alleged Messaging Privacy Invasions

It may be a new year, but the world’s largest social network is still squaring off against last year’s claims of privacy invasion.

The latest comes from Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley, two Facebook users who filed a lawsuit against the company for allegedly invading the privacy of their Facebook messages for the purposes of sharing data with marketers.

“[Facebook] makes assurances of user control over privacy settings and messaging options. These assurances affirmatively state that only senders and intended recipients are privy to the contents of their nonpublic communications,” Campbell and Hurley said in a filing with the U.S. District Court of Northern California this week.

“In reality, Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions across its network, including those it labels ‘private,’ in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users,” the filing said.

That information was used to create more robust profiles of Facebook’s users in order to “improve its marketing algorithms and increase its ability to profit from its users,” according to the filing.

“We believe the allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” a Facebook spokesperson told Re/code.

This is far from the first time Facebook has dealt with legal troubles from its users. Last year, Facebook settled a class-action suit that claimed that the company’s “Sponsored Stories” advertising products shared users’ “Like” data with friends without the ability to opt out of the program.

Read the full text of the filing below:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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