Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 2/18/2009 05:46:00 PM

ConnectU vs. Facebook Unredacted Trade Secrets Settlement

In a follow-up on a case we first reported on in July 2007, College News is reporting that inadequate redaction of a .pdf document containing settlement information has resulted in the disclosure of otherwise confidential terms.

Specifically, the inadvertently disclosed portions revealed that ConnectU received somewhere between from $31 million and $65 million to settle its lawsuit--and that Facebook’s internal valuation was a hefty $3.7 billion.

The article cites ZDnet quoting an Adobe senior product manager saying that someone had “added a white rectangle over the white text in order to cover it” thinking incorrectly it was “sufficient to make that content undiscoverable”.

The lawsuit was brought against Facebook originally in 2007 after ConnectU’s creators accused Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their ideas while they were all students at Harvard University.
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