• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 12, 2011

Facebook is asking a federal judge to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging that the social networking service violated users' privacy with referrer headers that sent users' names to advertisers.

In a motion filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the company urges U.S. District Court Judge James Ware to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that none of the users who are suing allege that they suffered any kind of tangible loss. "Although the complaint includes speculative assertions of possible danger that disclosing user IDs or usernames in referrer headers may pose to users generally, it contains no allegations that named plaintiffs themselves have suffered actual injury or face a risk of imminent, palpable injury as a result of such a disclosure," Facebook argues.

The social networking service also contends that it did not violate federal wiretap law because that statute applies to contents of communications -- like emails -- and not referrer headers. What's more, the social networking service argues, transmitting users' names to advertisers doesn't in itself reveal "personally identifiable information" because Facebook considers users' names to be publicly available.

The lawsuit grew out of a 2009 report, "On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks," by computer scientists from AT&T and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The researchers alleged that Facebook and other social networking sites leak personally identifiable information by including it in the HTTP header information that is automatically sent to ad networks.

At the time, a Facebook spokesperson said that referring URLs only provided information about the profile page a user had been on when he or she clicked on the ad, but didn't reveal whether that user was the person featured in the profile or a friend of the member.

But last May, Harvard professor Ben Edelman alleged in follow-up research that Facebook automatically embeds a profile tag in referring URLs when users view their own profile pages.

Facebook subsequently said it revised its code, but was nonetheless hit with several potential class-action lawsuits, which were later consolidated in front of Ware.