Racine's office specifically cites the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the suit, noting that Facebook's lax data sharing policies with third-parties led to users having their personal data harvested for profit without their consent.
But in recent years he says that balance — i.e. of looking at an ad and getting to view some free content — has become hugely skewed, with far more personal data being harvested than can be justified.
Nowadays falling foul of dark pattern design most often means you'll have unwittingly agreed to your personal data being harvested and shared with a very large number of data brokers who profit from background trading people's information — without making it clear they're doing so nor what exactly they're doing to turn your data into their gold.
Yet the vast majority of people whose personal data was harvested from Facebook by Kogan clearly had no idea what was possible under its platform terms — which, until 2015, allowed one user to 'consent' to the sharing of all their Facebook friends.
The wider context here is that Oath is Verizon's bid to better compete for digital ad spend with the personal-data-harvesting ad-targeting specialists of the Internet: aka Google and Facebook.
And as more and more studies highlight consumer concern about how personal data is being harvested and processed, regulators are also taking notice — and turning up the heat.
It's the second such post-Snowden privacy-focused report published by Pew, after an earlier report last November which identified huge concern among web users about how their personal data is being harvested and processed by online companies.
For example, via the Security Centre, a user can go to a location tab and see all of the apps that use location and then turn off their ability to use personal data, or to harvest your Wi-Fi information.
You might think the types of personal data that Facebook harvests are trivial — and so wonder what's the big deal if the company is using deceptive design to obtain people's consent?
