A class action lawsuit over alleged breaches of EU privacy law, mass surveillance and involvement in the NSA’s Prism snooping programme has been filed against Facebook in Vienna.
The lawsuit, which was officially filed in a Vienna court on Thursday, is being spearheaded by 27-year-old Austrian law graduate and privacy campaigner Max Schrems.
The closely-watched case sees 25,000 users suing the social network for various rights violations, ranging from the “illegal” tracking of their data under EU law to Facebook’s involvement with the US National Security Agency. Each of the plaintiffs is claiming a “token amount” of €500 (£392) in damages, while a further 55,000 users have registered to join the procedures at a later stage. “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,” said Schrems.
Schrems is also fighting to stop the US security services from gaining access to his personal data held by Facebook and other US technology firms. His case, which has been crowdfunded, is currently being heard in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, Europe’s highest court. Facebook declined to comment. In February 2015, Facebook updated its privacy policy which allows Facebook to track you, the Facebook user activity even after you have left Facebook website to surf other pages. This is really bad news for internet security and privacy lovers.
