A federal court in May 2012 hit Facebook with a $15 billion lawsuit after it was found that the social network was tracking customers after they logged out of its system. The court filing claims that Facebook is violating federal wiretap laws.
The Menlo Park company is now asking that the case be dismissed because the defendants behind the case have failed to specify how they were harmed by the error in Facebook’s judgement.
According to Bloomberg:
The complaint suffers from an “utter lack of allegations of any injury to these particular named plaintiffs,” Matthew Brown, a lawyer for Facebook, today told U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California. The plaintiffs haven’t identified what websites they visited, what kind of data or information was collected, or whether Facebook used it or disclosed it to anyone else, Brown said. “They have not done anything close to that.”
The $15 billion class action lawsuit filed in federal court has combined 21 separate cases filed in the US in 2011 and early 2012. The Federal Wiretap Act provides statutory damages per user of $100 per day per violation (up to a maximum of $10,000 per user).
The lawsuit also asserts that Facebook violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California Statutes, and California common law.
It should be noted that other lawsuits have found that browser cookies which track user activities are not part of wiretap rules.
Facebook has not yet commented on its decision to ask for a dismissal.
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