A law student from Austria has filed a class action law suit against Facebook over privacy violations, urging the social network’s 1.32 billion users around the globe to join him in his legal battle.
Max Schrems, who has sued Facebook and several other top US tech
companies before, filed his newest claim at the commercial court
in Vienna on Friday.
The legal proceeding will run as a class action because the
Austrian law allows a group of people to transfer their financial
claims to a single person – Schrems, in this case.
The student invited other internet users to take part in the
action at www.fbclaim.com using their Facebook logins.
“Facebook has a long list of violations,” Schrems wrote on
Facebook Class Action website. “For this lawsuit we have
chosen basic or obvious violations of the law: The privacy
policy, participation in the PRISM program, Facebook’s graph
search, apps on Facebook, tracking on other web pages (e.g. via
the 'like buttons'), ‘big data’ systems that spy on users or the
non-compliance with access requests.”
The Austrian, who is looking for injunctions under EU
data-protection law, wants to receive damages of 500 euros per
user for the above mentioned violations by the social network.
“Our aim is to make Facebook finally operate lawfully in the area
of data protection,” he said.
The users aren’t risking any money by joining the case as a
German legal financing provider will bear the legal costs if
Schrems loses.
In case of victory the 26-year-old student will receive the same
500 euros as any other class action claimant.
However, US and Canadian users won’t be able to participate as
the lawsuit is filed against Facebook Ireland, which runs all of
the company’s operations outside North America.
“We have this habit of pointing the finger at the US, but
we’re not enforcing our rights anyway,” Schrems told
Reuters. “If we can get a class action through like this, it
will send out a huge signal to the industry overall.”
The Austrian appealed to the Irish High Court to rule on
allegations that US companies, including Microsoft, Google and
Facebook, helped the NSA harvest private data from EU citizens.
However, the Irish judges referred the case to the European Court
of Justice, which hasn’t reviewed it yet.
“There are serious reasons to suspect that the Irish authorities
have deliberately not taken action against Facebook. Many
observers assume that this was based on political reasons,”
Schrems wrote at Facebook Class Action website.
The Austrian court is in no way bound by any finding and decision
made by the Irish authority, he added.