Facebook has been accused of violating both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy laws. The social networking company allegedly intercepted and scanned private messages and sold the user data to various advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators. 

Facebook has been accused of intercepting private messages of its users to provide data to marketers, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California. The social networking company scanned plaintiffs’ private messages containing URLs (uniform resource locators) and searched the website identified in the URL for “purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling,” according to the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The company does not engage in the practice to facilitate the transmission of users’ communications via Facebook, but to enable it to mine user data and profit by sharing the data with third parties such as advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators, the complaint said.