And Now It's Time For The Bogus Class Action Lawsuits Against Facebook
from the pick-your-popular-company-and-sue dept
At this point, it's just an unfortunate fact of life that as a company becomes more well known it will soon be targeted by totally random lawsuits. We've already seen all sorts of random people suing to take credit for the idea of Facebook (all of whom ignored that Facebook's success had nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with the execution). Now it's time for random users and their lawyers to come up with all sorts of odd lawsuit ideas. For example, we've now got a woman and her lawyer trying to create a class action lawsuit against Facebook because the woman got a new mobile phone number, and that number is receiving too many unwanted text messages that were sent through Facebook and intended for the previous owner of the number. Why is this Facebook's fault? That's not clear, but it's a hot company worth billions, so might as well sue and hope to get some cash out of it. This is a problem that plenty of people face if they get a new phone number that's been "recycled" but it's hardly the fault of the companies who are simply forwarding the messages as directed.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: class action, recycled numbers, text messaging
Companies: facebook
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SPAM
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Facebook
I'm calling Larry the Lawyer right now!!
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Unintended consequences
I know I will shortly be getting a Relakks account, if for no other reason than to give Comcast their due comeuppance! When they fess up and promise to stop, then so will I!
Good job Comcrap!
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Re:
OK, here's what I don't understand. The article doesn't mention whether she actually contacted Facebook and asked them to stop the messages. Surely if they are contacted about a situation like this, it's a trivial matter to check with the user and stop the messages?
Sounds like she went straight to court without trying to contact them first. Facebook aren't responsible for the content of the messages, they're just forwarding them as requested, and can't change the forwarding if they don't know the owner of the number has changed - which they can't know unless someone (e.g. the new/old owner) tells them.
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Re: Re: Facebook Lawsuit
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Ahem
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New laws needed
When this happens, and court decisions are handed down against these stupid lawsuits, lawyers will think twice before they get involved in this nonsense.
Fight fire with fire or it will never end.
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Stupidity
- Recycling phone numbers
- Facebook (FB) continuing to send SMS while a phone number is out of action
- FB user signing up for SMS alerts and then walking away when they lose their phone
- Charging for receiving SMS
- FB unable to manage their alert system
- The Telco unable to manage their SMS system and apply a selective block
- A lawsuit
- A class action law suit
- A lawsuit against FB instead of the Telco.
- AP picking up the story
- Hundreds of news outlets regurgitating the AP story verbatim without adding any value.
Still. I guess, "That's just the way it is in the USA".
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This reminds me of something....
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sue Facebook for the Telco's mistake!
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Get a Facebook phone number
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A better lawsuit
"Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.
That's the finding published on Friday by Stefan Berteau, senior research engineer at CA's Threat Research Group in a note summarizing tests he conducted."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140182-c,onlineprivacy/article.html
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