25,000 users join Europe v. Facebook suit
An Austrian law graduate and 25,000 other Facebook users in Europe are taking on the social media giant claiming the company invaded their privacy by participating in the NSA’s PRISM dragnet surveillance program, among other invasions.
The case is being brought against Facebook Ireland, which makes up 80% of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users. The branch registers all accounts outside the United States and Canada.
Since 2012, privacy advocate and lawyer, Max Schrems, has been fighting to force Facebook to be more responsible with the data it collects.
After being rejected by a Vienna commercial court, the privacy lawsuit is now headed to a regional court in Vienna.
The Europe v. Facebook campaign started in August and invited thousands of European Facebook users to join the lawsuit, which claims that Facebook’s data-use policy is invalid under EU law.
The absence of consent to certain types of data use, tracking the use of external websites through Facebook “Likes” and unauthorized sharing of data with external entities are among the claims of the lawsuit.
Europe v. Facebook is set to cover procedural objections in court. Facebook is expected to argue that, under European law, the Vienna court is not competent to deal with the suit.
Austrian law firm, Roland ProzessFinanz AG, is seeking damages of 500 Euros ($533.81) per lawsuit participant. Schrems is not seeking any money for himself.
“Basically we are asking Facebook to stop mass surveillance, to [have] a proper privacy policy that people can understand,” Schrems told a blog called AFP, “but also to stop collecting data of people that are not even Facebook users.”
Facebook Ireland has already been audited by the Irish Data Protection Commission in 2011 and 2012. The commission found that Facebook satisfied their recommendations that included turning off a facial-recognition tagging feature.
