Facebook and Washington State take on a clickjacker

PRIVACY SHREDDING Facebook and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna filed two separate lawsuits against the owners of Adscend Media alleging the use of clickjacking.

Adscent Media alledgedly tricked Facebook users into giving up personal information and paying for subscription services. McKenna said, "We don't 'like' schemes that illegally trick Facebook users into giving up personal information or paying for unwanted subscription services through spam," and went onto praise Facebook's efforts in bringing Adscent to book.

Facebook filed a separate lawsuit against Adscent, with the firm's general counsel Ted Ullyot saying, "Security is an arms race, and that's why Facebook is committed to constantly improving our consumer safeguards while pursuing and supporting civil and criminal consequences for bad actors." After all, if anyone is getting your personal information it should be Facebook.

Clickjacking on Facebook has included users unwittingly 'liking' the Facebook pages of scammers in order to increase knowledge or worse still clicking on entirely different links that end up spamming the scammer's Facebook page.

McKenna has filed proceedings against Adscent Media in US District Court in Seattle, claiming violations of the CAN-SPAM act, Washington's Commercial Electronic Mail Act and the state's Consumer Protection Act. Facebook filed its lawsuit against the firm in US federal court in the Northern District of California. µ