Facebook Sued for illegally Scanning Users' Private Messages

Good luck with that. Do you own the servers or service? If not, you have no say in what goes on.

The internet is not a secure, private place. It never has been. Whenever you post/upload/etc on the Internet, all bets are off.

Something I was told back in the days of Myspace, and holds true even more now is "If you put it on (website) it's like yelling it out in timesquare". It comes as no surprise to me that this is/has been happening and especially with things like targeted advertisements.

Sadly SN (Join to see) the only way to avoid having businesses in your personal affairs is to stay off the internet. No facebook, no google, no email, no smart phone. This of course is not realistic in our modern world. We have to deal with a certain amount of this as a part of living in our modern technology based society. How many of us use a computer at work? How many of us have a professional E-Mail account? RP, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, GMail, Amazon, EBay, etc... all things that we use to communicate, conduct personal business, and make our lives easier. The side effect is that advertisers use this to map our habits so that they can direct their advertising to the interests of the user. It is also how nefarious software ends up on computers. So since we cannot eliminate it, the best we can do is mitigate the invasion by being thoughtful before we surf. Now with this breach of trust it goes a step further. If I go on Facebook and I share a picture, I have no presumption that it is not being viewed, re-posted, cataloged, and otherwise used to build a profile of my habits. It is shared publicly (regardless of what the privacy settings are). When I send a personal message, that is a different story. That is a message directed to a specific individual, or group of individuals. It is not put on the main facebook page because I want to keep the information to the individuals in the message. While that information is not secure, it is expected that it is not being used to build a profile to be used for advertisers. It is not a trust, but it is shady for them to do that.