As the lawsuit stands, it'd benefit any Facebook user that'd sent or received links via the site's private message system in the past two years, as reported by Bloomberg. We'd be remiss if we left out the possible pay-out, though: "as much as" $10,000 in damages for each user. Multiply that by Facebook's billion-plus users, carry the one and you come out to a whole lot of money. In less exciting news, the plaintiffs also want the social giant to stop scanning messages moving forward. Sound familiar? Hopefully so, because Google is under similar (but not class-action) legal scrutiny for message scanning of its own. The results of both of these cases will almost assuredly have big effects for how we communicate on the web moving forward, and you can bet we'll be following them closely in the coming year.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the suit.