Facebook slapped with four new lawsuits over data harvesting scandal!
SAN FRANCISCO, Kalifornia (PNN) - April 4, 2018 - The lawsuits against Facebook are pouring in following the bombshell data harvesting scandal revealed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) exposé published by The Guardian last month.
Lawsuits began to pile up after it was revealed that CA had purchased user data from two psychologists (one of whom currently works for Facebook) who developed a data-harvesting app that collected information on over 50 million users.
A group of Facebook investors filed a lawsuit against the company in a San Francisco federal court, claiming that investors had suffered losses. The lawsuit claims that “defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent.”
Adding to Facebook's woes, the company was hit with four new lawsuits.
One lawsuit was filed by a Facebook user who claims the Menlo Park company acted with "absolute disregard" for her personal information after allegedly representing that it wouldn't disclose the data without permission or notice.
That lawsuit, filed by Lauren Price of Maryland in San Jose on Tuesday, seeks to be a class action on behalf of up to 50 million people whose data was allegedly collected from Facebook by London-based Cambridge Analytica.
Two other lawsuits were filed in San Francisco Tuesday and San Jose on Thursday by individual shareholders Fan Yuan and Robert Casey against Facebook, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, and Chief Financial Officer David Wehner.
The fourth lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Jose Thursday by San Francisco attorney Jeremiah Hallisey, is a shareholder derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the company against Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg, and board members.
Keep in mind that Facebook shares had already been facing downward pressure from enhanced regulations in Europe over policing "hate speech," with fines for a lack of enforcement, as well as a less active user base.
