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Member, Beacon International Group, Ltd.
A website has gotten into trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for addressing the apparently burning — and perhaps hurtful — question of whether someone is a jerk by allegedly getting its information from Facebook.
Hingham, Mass.-based Jerk.com and its owner, John Fanning, co-founder of Napster, are being charged with improperly using personal information from Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook Inc. to create profiles labeling more than 73 million people, including children, either a “jerk” or “not a jerk,” according to news reports from Bloomberg and Boston.com.
The FTC says the website violated the FTC Act when it falsely claimed the content on Jerk.com had been created by other users of the site, and that most of its content was harvested from Facebook.
Victims were also falsely told they could revise their status by paying $30 to the website, the FTC said.
Just as Claude Raines says in Casablanca, “I’m shocked! Shocked!”
Jerk.com, through its attorney, says it thought the information it obtained from Facebook was publicly available.
“We were equally horrified to discover that Facebook is placing personal information from its users including name and photographs in the public domain without requiring any agreement to its terms of service where anyone can acquire it,” said Jerk.com’s attorney in a statement. “Most users don’t know it’s happening.”
Meanwhile, the company that has encouraged millions to make their every move public said it was pleased with the FTC’s action.
“We take breaches of our terms seriously,” Facebook said in a statement. “We applaud the FTC and will continue to work with them as they pursue Jerk.com and others that seek to abuse people who use our services.”