Facebook Hit With Another Data Mining Scheme Class Action Lawsuit

Top Class Actions’s website and social media posts use affiliate links. If you make a purchase using such links, we may receive a commission, but it will not result in any additional charges to you. Please review our Affiliate Link Disclosure for more information.

For the second time in two weeks, Facebook users have accused the social media giant of sharing their data with Cambridge Analytica LLC, a data firm with alleged links to President Donald Trump.

Plaintiff Matthew Lodowski filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook on March 23, claiming that Cambridge Analytica and its associates, hedge fund billionaire Robert Leroy Mercer, and Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan, unlawfully obtained profile and account data from almost 50 million Facebook users.

He claims that this action represents a conspiracy between the parties and was done without the knowledge or consent of the Facebook users.

Lodowski alleges that Facebook was negligent in its duty to protect its users’ data, and once the company learned that Cambridge Analytica obtained the data, did not take adequate measures to retrieve the data, and did not notify its users of the event.

The Facebook data mining class action lawsuit calls Cambridge Analytica a “privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process,” and claims that the company has ties to Trump. Allegedly, the deeply conservative Mercer family invested millions of dollars in the company.

The Facebook class action lawsuit goes on to state that Alexander Nix, the company’s recently-suspended CEO confirms that the Trump campaign purchased Cambridge Analytica’s services, and that Nix called Trump, who was a presidential candidate at the time, a “good businessman.”

The Facebook Cambridge Analytica data class action lawsuit cites a recent article by the Guardian that details “an elaborate voter targeting program developed and used by CA to influence voter preferences in the 2016 presidential election for the United States for the benefit of then candidate Donald Trump.”

The Cambridge Analytica data mining class action lawsuit goes on to claim that the Guardian article states the voter targeting program “used a massive database, filled with Facebook users’ surreptitiously acquired Facebook data, to target voters with information that was designed to manipulate or influence their voting preferences.”

Allegedly, a whistleblower named Christopher Wylie brought the issues to the Guardian’s attention. Wylie claims that Cambridge Analytics had initially hired Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan and his company, Global Science Research, to aggregate the data set that would allow the company to target users and influence their voting preferences with advertising and false information.

Wylie told the Guardian that Facebook knew that Cambridge Analytics and Global Science research were extracting its data because “their security protocols were trigger because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use.” Facebook was allegedly not concerned with the data extraction if it was for academic use.

The Facebook data extraction class action lawsuit claims that the social media giant discovered the data was being used for purposes other than academic research when the Guardian published its first report on the story in December 2015, but did not take action until months later, and even then, took minimal action.

In related legal news, Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO has been banned from managing U.K. organisations for seven years following the Facebook data scandal that forced the company into termination.

Lodwoski is represented by W. Craft Hughes and Jarrett L. Ellzey of Hughes Ellzey LLP.

The Facebook Cambridge Analytica Data Mining Class Action Lawsuit is Matthew Lodowski v. Facebook Inc., et al., Case No. 4:18-cv-00907, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division.