Facebook Fights Off Regulatory and Legal Foes

The social networking privacy bill that Facebook and other Internet companies lobbied to stop failed a second and final time in the California Senate on Thursday. SB 242 would have required sites to default personal information to private and make users select privacy settings before being able to use a site.

Also Thursday, Facebook submitted a court filing to discredit Paul Ceglia, one of the many litigants claiming partial ownership of Facebook based on dealings with Mark Zuckerberg around the time the site started.

Facebook hired a private investigator who showed Ceglia had a longer history of fraud than previously reported, a document analyst who said Ceglia’s contract was a forgery, a forensics firm that examined Zuckerberg’s college email account and found additional emails that show Ceglia may have failed to pay Zuckerberg, and a linguistic analyst who said the emails in Zuckerberg’s account used different language and formatting than those Ceglia had attributed to Zuckerberg.

Ceglia said in a statement put out by his lawyers that he “disagrees with the opinions within the filing.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.