In Wake of Cambridge Analytica Saga, Class Actions Roll in Against Facebook
The social media giant was hit with a pair of class action lawsuits Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
March 21, 2018 at 05:52 PM
3 minute read
The inevitable legal blowback from Facebook's Cambridge Analytica episode has begun.
The social media giant was hit with a pair of class action lawsuits Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
First, lawyers at Pomerantz filed a stock-drop lawsuit against Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and CFO David Wehner, claiming the company misled shareholders about its own data privacy policies and the possibility of the company coming under heightened regulatory scrutiny. Then, a trio of law firms—Sacramento's Clayeo C. Arnold, A Professional Law Corporation, Jacksonville, Florida's Abbott Law Group, and Tampa's Morgan & Morgan—brought claims that Cambridge Analytica and Facebook violated Facebook users' privacy rights and California's Unfair Competition Law.
“Facebook, for its part, knew this improper data aggregation was occurring and failed to stop it, or actively avoided discovering such knowledge in order to profess supposed ignorance,” wrote the privacy lawyers, including Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis, who is serving as lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation targeting Yahoo with claims related to its massive data breach.
In response to the lawsuits, a Facebook spokeswoman provided a statement from Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel. “We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens,” Grewal said.
Earlier this week, Grewal said on the company's blog that Facebook suspended the app in 2015 that passed data along to Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling firm closely associated with President Donald Trump's campaign. Grewal wrote that Cambridge Analytica and the app creators had certified at the time that they destroyed the harvested data.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Yanchunis questioned why it took reporting by the media for Facebook to come forward with that information.
“It's funny how companies in Facebook's position become advocates of their consumers' rights when something is outed in the public press or a lawsuit is filed,” he said. “My concern is for the 500 million consumers who use Facebook: What guarantee do we have that this won't happen again?”
On top of the private lawsuits, Facebook is reportedly facing investigations from several states attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission.
When asked about what the private lawyers would add to mix, Yanchunis chuckled.
“I don't mean to laugh. This isn't my first privacy case,” Yanchunis said. “I believe that lawyers who practice in this area have been much more effective in enforcing the rights of consumers than regulators.”
Jennifer Pafiti of Pomerantz, one of the lawyers handling the securities suit, didn't respond to a message seeking comment.
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