Shortly after Facebook was sued for allegedly leaking users' names via referrer headers, the company responded by filing court papers
arguing that the case should be dismissed because users weren't harmed by any leakage.
That's an
argument that some other courts have endorsed. For instance, U.S. District Court Judge Otis Wright II in the Central District of California recently threw out a consumer's lawsuit against online data
broker Spokeo on the theory that the Web user didn't allege economic injury. (The user in that case recently tried again with an amended complaint alleging that he hasn't been able to find work as a
result of inaccurate information on Spokeo.)
Legal experts say that plaintiffs in privacy cases generally face hurdles because they can't point to concrete harms that resulted from the alleged data breach.
Still, the consumers who are suing Facebook aren't ready to throw in the towel just yet. "For every wrong there is a remedy," they assert in legal papers filed last week.
They go on to say
that they have suffered economic harm on the theory that their personal information "has a market-definable actual value, just like baseball cards or used cars."
What's more, they argue, if
anyone profits from "the distribution of their personal data" it should be them, and not Facebook. "Plaintiffs have lost the right to provide that data to entities in exchange for goods and services,
because these entities have received the information from Facebook, thus depriving plaintiffs of the chance to sell it to these entities."
While that may be so, the argument seems like a
stretch, considering that few if any Facebook users likely attempt to sell their names to ad networks. Still, there's no telling what will happen in court. A judge might well decide that the users'
argument is strong enough to keep the case alive long enough for both sides to gather more evidence -- in which case the fallout from Facebook's continuing privacy problems won't go away any time
soon.