After the settlement approved by the US District Court of Northern California over privacy on Facebook, the company will have to pay $20 million for putting users’ names and faces in “Sponsored Story” ads without their permission and without paying them, the issue on the compliance with applicable privacy laws of other direct marketing practices on social media has become more and more prominent.

In the case referred above, the US District court found that 150 million Facebook users had their names and/or likeness misappropriated to promote products and services through Facebook’s sponsored stories program. However, interestingly the court also held that “Regardless of the degree of benefit to Facebook, however, plaintiffs faced a substantial burden in showing they were injured by the Sponsored Stories”.

The above mentioned statement would have had interesting implications before Italian courts. Indeed, Italian data protection law provides that whoever causes damages because of the processing of personal data is obliged to recover such damages unless it proves to have put in place all the measures aimed at avoiding such damages i.e. the burden of proof of having implemented everything necessary to prevent the damages will be on the breaching party. And this evidence is very difficult to provide in the case of a major privacy breach.

But the matter is even more interesting than just your privacy on Facebook. If we look at other social media features then everyone has experienced some sponsored messages published on their Facebook timeline as if they were a message from one of their friends.