As part of its effort to keep users from becoming too happy with the service, Facebook is now censoring private messages between users.
We knew that Facebook was removing public links to torrents hosted at The Pirate Bay, but they’ve now decided to block any of those links that may be sent via private message as well.
Wired.com tested this hypothesis by sending a private message containing a Pirate Bay torrent link to the book Don Quixote, which is available in the public domain.
The message bounced – twice.
Here is the message that followed…
“This Message Contains Blocked Content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.”
Facebook is apparently falling back on its Terms of Service as their defense for doing this. That’s all well and good except for that fact that private messages are covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prohibits providers from intercepting user messages.
Looks like we’re back to that Borg mentality once again over at Facebook.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Facebook Shuts Down Links to Pirate Bay (insidefacebook.com)
- Facebook is not your friend, take 2 (bigsexymedia.com)
- The Pirate Bay Torrents on Facebook (beatcrave.com)
- Is Facebook the new Pirate Bay? (news.cnet.com)
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