Austrian law student launches class action lawsuit against Facebook
An Austrian law student has filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook alleging that the company violated the privacy of its users through cooperation with the National Security Agency and the unauthorized sale of user data.
Reuters reports that Max Schrems, a 26-year-old law student, filed the lawsuit on behalf of Facebook's 1.3 billion users. According to Austrian law, people may transfer their monetary claims to a single person before the beginning of a large lawsuit involving multiple plaintiffs.
In this case, the transferring of claims is done by signing on to the website fbclaim.com.
The website describes the purpose of the lawsuit as follows, "The main point is that the major Internet companies do not respect our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. Facebook is only one example of many, but one has to start somewhere."
Anyone outside the United States and Canada may join the lawsuit, which has the goal of earning $670 for every user. Plaintiffs must be outside the United States and Canada, because Facebook's international operations are headquartered in Ireland, which is under European Union jurisdiction.
Underpinning the lawsuit is the EU Data Protection Directive. This directive was recently invoked to successfully petition for the "right to be forgotten" which gives people an avenue to have their history stricken from Internet searches.
In addition to the concerns about the NSA, the lawsuit claims that Facebook illegally tracked its users as they visited other websites. The lawsuit also contends that Facebook shared data with external applications despite not receiving authorization to do so.
Facebook is currently valued at more than $200 billion according to Reuters. In the second quarter of 2014, the company recorded a 61 percent increase in sales derived primarily from mobile advertising.
The company has recently come under fire for experiments where users' newsfeeds were manipulated to determine whether or not they would have a positive or negative emotional reaction.
