Max Schrems is a 27-year-old law graduate from Austria who is wasting no time jumping into the world of law: he is leading a class-action suit against Facebook for alleged privacy breaches.
Should the case against the social media giant succeed, Schrems envisions an overhaul of the company’s approach to data protection.
Schrems and 25,000 other Facebook users are suing the company over numerous rights violations, including the tracking of their data (a violation of EU law) as well as Facebook’s involvement in the PRISM surveillance program of the US National Security Agency.
“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,” Schrems told the Associated Foreign Press in an interview. “There is a wide number of issues in the lawsuit and we hope to kind of win all of them and to get a landmark case against US data-gathering companies.”
The case is specifically brought against Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin. This location is responsible for registering all accounts outside the US and Canada, which equates to about 80% of the social network’s 1.35 billion users.
Schrems was able to file his suit against the Irish subsidiary at a civil court in Vienna because under EU law, all member states must enforce court rulings from any other member state.
He originally proposed the idea of a class action law suit back in August. Within days of its announcement, thousands of people, mostly from Europe but a good percentage from Asia, Latin America, and Australia, too, had signed up to be a part of it. Schrems had to limit the number of participants to 25,000, but a further 55,000 have already registered to join the proceedings at a later state.
Each plaintiff is claiming a “token amount” of 500 euros ($540 USD) in damages.
Schrems points out that his case is not about getting rich; rather, it’s “about the principle that fundamental rights have to be applied.”
“We have privacy laws here in Europe but we are not enforcing (them),” he added.
“The core issue is: do online companies have to stick to the rules or do they live somewhere in the Wild West where they can do whatever they want to do?”
Schrems got the idea for the case nearly four years ago while studying abroad at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. It was there that he discovered company’s had little concern towards European privacy laws.
“The general approach in Silicon Valley is that you can do anything you want in Europe” without facing any major consequences, Schrems said.
As a result of this discovery, he set up the Europe-v-Facebook advocacy group, which has particularly targeted the Safe Harbor agreement, a data exchange pact signed in 2000 between the United States and European Union.
The case against Facebook marks the activist’s latest endeavor.
Facebook has not made officials available for comment.
Via Phys.org
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