Privacy campaign group Europe-v-Facebook is inviting Facebook users outside the U.S. and Canada to join a lawsuit against the company, which it alleges violates privacy laws. Europe-v-Facebook’s front man Max Schrems filed suit with the commercial court in Vienna, Austria, where he lives, the group said Friday on a website devoted to the case, fbclaim.com. Schrems sued Facebook Ireland, which is responsible for processing the data of users outside the U.S. and Canada. Under EU law, consumers can always sue businesses at the relevant court of their home country.
Serial anti-Facebook litigant Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, has branched out from his usual strategy of tackling the data-munching social network in Ireland, home of Facebook’s international operations. On Friday, he announced a class action lawsuit in his home country, too — and anyone outside the U.S. and Canada can take part. So far, Schrems and his “Europe v Facebook” group have been remarkably successful in their quest to force Facebook to comply with European data protection law. They’ve managed to get Facebook to cough up more user data when the relevant users ask, they hobbled some of the firm’s facial recognition functionality, and they’re the reason why Europe’s highest court is now having to consider the legality of the NSA’s PRISM program and its effect on the U.S.-European Safe Harbor agreement. The lawsuit revealed on Friday in Vienna will take on many aspects of Facebook’s behavior, including its reported participation in the PRISM program, its privacy policy, the fact that it tracks anyone who visits a web page with a “like” button on it, the “absence of effective consent to many types of data use” and non-compliance with data access requests.
