Facebook is charged with the privacy violation

Facebook and a number of other companies such as Blockbuster, Fandango and Overstock are being charged with violating online privacy and computer fraud laws related to Facebook's controversial Beacon system in a class-action suit filed in California.

Beacon represents an application developed by Facebook that shares information about Facebook users' Internet activities with friends. Thus when a Facebook user who has Beacon buys an item on Overstock.com, for example, a message appears on their Facebook page about the purchase and this information is available to all the user's friends.

The lawsuit reproaches Facebook for gathering information about its users' online activities without getting appropriate permission from them. Moreover the suit alleges that Beacon collected information about all visitors -- not just Facebook users -- who conducted certain activities on the third-party sites that were part of the program.

"Thus, non-Facebook persons who utilized the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate Websites were not told that their transaction, and indeed, every transaction they engaged in upon the Website was being communicated to a third party (Facebook) with whom they had no relationship whatsoever," the suit reads.

The attorneys that filed the suit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ask the court to require Facebook and the other affiliate sites to delete any of the data they collected without user knowledge, pay out reimbursements to class members and return any "ill-gotten gains" from the activities that allegedly violated privacy and fraud laws.

As per the definition in the suit the class represents all Facebook members who during the period of Nov. 7, 2007, through Dec. 5, 2007 visited any of the Beacon affiliate Web pages and did something that would trigger Beacon to send a message to Facebook.