A US judge has ruled that Facebook must face a class action lawsuit accusing it of violating its users' privacy by scanning the content of messages they sent to other users for advertising purposes, reported Reuters.
US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, on 23 December dismissed some state-law claims against the social media company but largely denied Facebook's bid to dismiss the lawsuit.
Facebook had argued that the alleged scanning of users' messages was allowed by an exception under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act for interceptions by service providers occurring in the ordinary course of business.
However, Hamilton said Facebook had "not offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary course of its business."
The lawsuit was filed in 2013 and alleged that Facebook scanned the content of private messages sent between users for links to websites and would then count any link in a tally of "likes" of the pages.
Those "likes" where then used to compile user profiles, which were then used for delivering targeted advertising to its users, the lawsuit said.
The complaint alleged that the scanning of the private messages violated the federal and California state law.
According to Tuesday's filing, Facebook stopped the practice at issue in October 2012. However the company said it still does some analysis of messages in order to protect against viruses and spam, the ruling said.
The lawsuit was filed by Facebook user Matthew Campbell and seeks class action status on behalf of US users who sent or received private messages that included website addresses in their content.
The case is Campbell v. Facebook, US District Court, Northern District of California, No. 13-5996.
