Class Action Lawsuit Against Facebook Gathers Momentum In Europe

Facebook is facing another class action lawsuit over user privacy, originating in Europe. Earlier this year a case was brought against Facebook claiming that the social network had been reviewing users’ private messages “for purposes unrelated to the facilitation of message transmission”. This time the class action is being spearheaded by the Austrian law student Max Schrems, and more than 17,000 people have now signed up to join.

The group – headed by Schrems – claim that Facebook has been engaging in following “unlawful acts”:

• Data use policy which is invalid under EU law
• The absence of effective consent to many types of data use
• Support of the NSA’s ‘PRISM’ surveillance programme
• Tracking of Internet users on external websites (e.g. through ‘Like buttons’)
• Monitoring and analysis of users through ‘big data’ systems
• Unlawful introduction of ‘Graph Search’
• Unauthorised passing on of user data to external applications

If you’ve not actually heard of Max Schrems before, you may well be familiar with the Europe vs Facebook group that he heads up. He is also the sole named claimant in this case, meaning that anyone else participating in the action will be free from the risks of having to pay any associated costs. Schrems is seeking to claim damages of €500 per user for the alleged data violations by Facebook, and with tens of thousands of users joining the class action, the bill levied at Facebook would be well into the millions if successful.

More details on this legal movement and the Europe vs Facebook group can be found on the FB Claim website set up by Schrems.

We’d just like to take this opportunity to reiterate that while SocialSafe is an application that allows you to download your personal data from Facebook – and other social networks – we never see nor store this data ourselves. Everything you choose to back up with SocialSafe is entirely yours and 100% private – we never hold your data and you can always access it.