As reported by AFP, on Thursday April 5th a class action lawsuit suing Facebook Ireland, the subsidiary that offers the popular social networking service outside North America, was filed at the civil court in Vienna. The class action lawsuit, headed by the activist Max Schrems, sees 25,000 users claiming a “token amount” of €500 in damages, accusing Facebook for a range of rights violations, starting from the “illegal” tracking of their personal data under EU law to Facebook’s involvement in the PRISM data collection program of the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
It was August 2014 when Max Schrems made news announcing he filed a lawsuit at the Austrian commercial court to pursue, on behalf of himself and other non-North American claimants, a variety of legal claims relating to Facebook’s alleged breaches of EU privacy law, mass surveillance and involvement in the NSA’s Prism snooping programme. Finally as the suit was rejected, because: “It is a claim that doesn’t belong at the commercial court but belongs at the regional court for civil cases,” so the commercial court’s spokesman, a new class action was filed at the civil court this time.
The case has been brought against the company’s European headquarters in Dublin, because it’s here that about 80% of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users are registered, and it’s here that users data are processed and collected referring to US data protection guidelines instead of European ones, breaking de-facto the European law. Moreover the case claims, “Facebook is collecting and processing data without securing adequate user consent and, in breach of EU law, passes on European user data to the NSA’s Prism surveillance programme”. Finally, this class action lawsuit takes issue with Facebook’s “Graph Search” function which following Schrems, saw the company alter user terms of service in order to obtain user consent.
“Basically we are asking Facebook to stop mass surveillance, to (have) a proper privacy policy that people can understand, but also to stop collecting data of people that are not even Facebook users,””Our goal is to finally get Facebook operating legally within data protection rules”, so Schrems.
Patrick Zingerle
To know more:
EU-LOGOS, »le Web ne connait pas les vacances d’été ! Facebook attaqué:20.000 utilisateurs attaquent Facebook pour violiation de la vie privée. Wikipedia crie à la censure.http://europe-liberte-securite-justice.org/2014/08/08/le-web-ne-connait-pas-les-vacances-dete-facebook-attaque-20-000-utilisateurs-attaquent-facebook-pour-violation-de-la-vie-privee-wikipedia-crie-a-la-censure/