• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 3, 2017

An activist is challenging Facebook's proposed settlement of a class-action alleging that it scanned the private messages users sent to each other through its platform.

The challenger -- Anna St. John, who serves as a lawyer with the Center for Class Action Fairness -- argues that the proposed deal "provides no value" to Facebook's users, and primarily benefits the class-action lawyers who brought the case -- and who now stand to collect up to $3.8 million in legal fees.

The settlement, unveiled earlier this year, stems from a 2013 lawsuit alleging that Facebook violated the federal wiretap law by intercepting users' messages to each other and scanning them. The company allegedly did so in order to determine whether people were sending their friends' links to outside sites.

The proposed deal requires Facebook to pay up to almost $4 million to the class-action attorneys who brought the case, and $5,000 each to the two Facebook users who served as plaintiffs, but no monetary awards to the company's other users. Instead, users who want to pursue claims for monetary damages must bring new lawsuits.

The settlement terms also require Facebook to add the following sentence to its terms of service: “We use tools to identify and store links shared in messages, including a count of the number of times links are shared.”

"The proposed settlement provides over $3.8 million to attorneys and 22 words on one of Facebook’s help pages for one year to everyone else," St. John argues in papers submitted to U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton in the Northern District of California. "Such a disproportionate ... and unfair settlement cannot be approved."

The allegations at the center of the battle emerged in 2012, when security researcher Ashkan Soltani reported that Facebook counts in-message links as "likes." Facebook said at the time that no private information is exposed, but confirmed that the like-counter "reflects the number of times people have clicked those buttons and also the number of times people have shared that page's link on Facebook."

The company has since changed that practice, but the settlement agreement does not prohibit Facebook from changing it back again. Instead, it merely notes that the company revised its back-end procedures.

"Class action settlement principles require that class members -- not class counsel -- be the primary beneficiaries of a settlement," St. John writes. "This settlement violates these principles and should be rejected."