In March, two Classmates.com users filed a federal class action lawsuit against the company charging privacy violations. The Seattle-run website, which offers information about former schoolmates, had recently announced that it would start posting users’ names, photos and the like on other sites–including Facebook, which has been battling enormous privacy grievances of its own after changing the way members can keep their information confidential. This week, Classmates defended itself with a brief arguing that all the information it began sharing was already public. The sole distinction between the pre- and post-change features is that previously Internet users could view the publicly available information at issue in this case only by landing on the www.classmates.com website (whether they were members of Classmates or not), and now they can view that same limited information (indeed, less information), while not technically on www.classmates.com.This may well be true. However, as the brief (see pdf of Classmates’ legal response) later acknowledges, Classmates required users to provide personal information before accessing anybody else’s. Even today, when you go the site, you can’t do anything until you identify the school you went to, and then give your name, date of birth, year of graduation and e-mail address.

Classmates’ brief calls this “basic sign-up information” that offers no barrier to proceeding through the site. This hardly seems true given how wary a lot of people are about providing personal information. Indeed, Classmates seems to recognize as much when it stresses that users “can even provide untrue information and still gain access.” (emphasis Classmates’)This argument may help Classmates win the case. But it runs counter to the way Classmates has always sold itself, according to plaintiffs’ attorney Roger Townsend. “Classmates was different from Facebook,” Townsend tells Seattle Weekly. “Consumers could maintain control over who could find them.” Or so they may have believed. Now, thanks to the company itself, they know otherwise.