Facebook is currently involved in a couple of separate lawsuits. One of them involves click fraud and the other involves data portability.
The Click Fraud Suit
Sports site Rootzoo filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in federal district court in San Jose, CA, according to a report from MediaPost. They are apparently seeking class action status. Rootzoo’s claim is that Facebook charged advertisers for more clicks than what actually happened. Specifically, there was one day where RootZoo claims to have only had 300 clicks, and that Facebook charged them for 804.
Facebook said in a statement, “We have developed a series of sophisticated systems to detect suspicious clicks and ensure advertisers are not charged for this activity. In addition, we analyze tremendous amounts of data to discern larger click patterns and, in rare cases where this research or other analysis reveals advertisers have been charged for invalid clicks, we have always, and will continue to, issue credits to impacted advertisers.”
Rootzoo is not the only party to complain of such activity from Facebook. A variety of users have voiced such issues in various locations on the web.
The Data Portability Suit
The second legal battle Facebook is involved with is a little more complicated. This one is actually a countersuit from a site called Power.com, who Facebook sued in the past after it violated their terms of service. Jason Kincaid paints a more elaborate rendition of the big picture in this case, but here is a look at the actual legal document.
20090709_PowerBattlesFacebook_Lawsuit –
If Facebook’s terms of service were violated, its hard to imagine the company losing this battle, although, I have no legal background by any means. Either way, it will be interesting to see the outcome of both cases.
