Just after Facebook went public as Mark Zuckerberg pushed the button to ring the iconic NASDAQ bell, the largest social network in the world was hit with a class-action lawsuit by the law firm Stewarts Law US. The firm announced that it put together 21 privacy lawsuits against Facebook into one class-action suit which charges the social network with violating user privacy by allegedly tracking their web usage. The law firm is demanding a sum of $15 billion which it arrived at by calling on the US Wiretap Act that “provides statutory damages of the greater of $100 per violation per day, up to $10,000, per Facebook user,” as stated in its class-action suit.
Interestingly, the timing couldn’t be better since Stewarts Law filed the suit just a little while before Facebook was set to offer its shares on NASDAQ for $38. In addition to that, the sum of $15 billion is less than the amount of money that Facebook would make at $38 by just $1 billion. That said however, David Straite who is a partner at Stewarts Law US told Bloomberg (via CNET) that the sum in damages could go up further and that his firm is “evaluating the way in which non-US residents” could be added to the plaintiff’s list.