Facebook faces lawsuit over collecting SMS and call history of users

The same way Apple’s battery throttling embarrassment lasted for a couple of months, Facebook’s data privacy scandal seems to be catching more heat in coming weeks. Recently Facebook’s Messenger app was found collecting users’ call and text message logs dating back many years. As of now, three users of the Facebook Messenger app have sued Facebook in a class action suit and asked for unspecified damages.

All of this started a couple of weeks back when it was disclosed that a data analytical company, Cambridge Analytica, was able to use Facebook’s API to gather personal information on 50 million users without their consent to target voters in the election campaign. This is deemed as the biggest data privacy scandal and is all over social networks since then.

The users who filed a lawsuit against the social-networking giant are alleging that the company violated their privacy by logging the histories of their phone calls and text messages.

The lawsuit has been filled in the US federal court in the Northern District of California and it seeks the status as a class action on behalf of all affected users.

Though Facebook has yet to respond to this recently filed lawsuit, yet it has previous exclaimed on the matter that they don’t share this data with any third party app and they ask before taking this data from users. As far as the company is concerned, we gave it permission to collect this data and it doesn’t event contains the content of those messages.

The worst-case scenario for Facebook could be that if the lawsuit is granted class-action status and Facebook is found guilty, the company would have to pay for the damages for exploiting tens of millions of Android users who used Facebook Messenger over the past few years.