Lawsuits Pile Up As #DeleteFacebook Movement Spreads
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 03/21/2018
After shaving more than $20 off its share price earlier this week, Facebook stock moved back into the green Wednesday as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would publicly address the company’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica some time during the next 24 hours.
At the same time, another lawsuit has been brought against the company, the second since the New York Times and the Observer reported over the weekend that the company had failed to stop CA from using data improperly gathered from tens of millions of users, a Maryland woman sued Facebook Tuesday in a San Jose, Calif. court. Her suit was filed on behalf of other Facebook users whose data were accessed by CA without their explicit permission, Bloomberg reported.
Circling back to Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and longtime CEO attributed the delay in making a statement to his desire to say something “meaningful” rather than delivering a quick, boilerplate comment, Axios reported.
On Tuesday, a group of Facebook investors filed a lawsuit against the company in a San Francisco federal court. The class action claims investors had suffered losses after the company disclosed that it had severed ties with Cambridge Analytica after blaming the company for “misleading” Facebook by saying it had deleted a cache of user data, when Facebook says it actually kept the data. CA has denied the allegations and said it didn’t use Facebook data for its work on the 2016 Trump campaign. Investors who purchased shares of Facebook between Feb. 3, when it filed its annual report and cited security breaches and improper access to user data, and March 19, the Monday after the exposes were published, are eligible to join the lawsuit.
Throughout that period, “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,” according to the complaint.
As Bloomberg explains, investors would have a strong case if they can prove that they invested in Facebook based on false or misleading information released by the company. By not policing app developers’ use of its users data, it could be argued that Facebook misled investors about how it handled and safeguarded private user data.
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