Class Action Claims Facebook, Now Meta, Harvest Minors’ Data for Profit

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A proposed class action claims Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alabama-based data center operator Starbelt, LLC have engaged in a “digital conspiracy” whereby the companies have harvested and profited from minors’ data in violation of their privacy rights.

The 55-page antitrust lawsuit, filed on January 1 by the parents of seven minors, alleges the defendants have illegally farmed, trafficked and stored a “Pandora’s box of minors [sic] images” and other information, such as their locations and biometric data, to develop a “digital dossier” of each user that can be monetized by Meta for profit and for a different purpose than what the social media platform has promised.

“Defendants have accumulated vasts [sic] amounts of personal information to include biometric facial recognition markers in violation of individual information privacy rights of minors as set out herein,” the complaint states, alleging the defendants have infringed upon consumers’ reasonable expectations of privacy and unlawfully used their data for commercial purposes.

The lawsuit argues that Facebook’s 2.85 billion active monthly users, in particular minors, did not consent to the unlawful harvesting and disclosing of their personal information, which includes biometric facial templates extracted from images and videos uploaded to the social media platform through facial recognition software, to third parties for profit. Although the defendants represented that they would not unlawfully acquire and disclose users’ information, the trafficking of minors’ images has occurred “on an unfathomable scale,” according to the complaint.

The case contends that Facebook’s recent rebranding and name change to Meta Platforms in October 2021 evidences that data harvesting is the “focal point” of the defendants’ profit center, and reflects the parties’ intent to use minors’ illegally acquired information to build a virtual reality world that is essentially “a video game using images of minors and others without proper legal permission.”

The lawsuit further argues that although Meta announced in November 2021 that it would remove its facial recognition feature and delete the facial templates it previously collected from users’ photos and videos, the defendants have already profited from and sold minors’ data to third parties in violation of their privacy rights.

“This transition to ‘Meta’ follows no less than four (4) years of minors’ image harvesting, biometric marking and trafficking,” the complaint attests.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of over two million Alabama Facebook users, or alternatively, more than 285 million U.S. users, whose images, digital identities, personal information and friends “network[s]” have been utilized by Facebook, allegedly in violation of antitrust laws.

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