14 DAY TRIAL // Suing Facebook seems to be a trend these days, and more and more people are going against the giant company over the never-ending issue: data privacy.
A 26-year-old law graduate from Austria, along with 25,000 other people, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook this week in Vienna's Commercial Court, Bangkok Post reported.
Max Schrems, the Austrian who had the courage to face the company in court, strongly disagrees with the way Facebook collects and uses the data obtained from its users and with the way the social media network uses the Like button to keep track of people’s choices.
The data privacy campaigner also accuses Facebook of having been involved in the 2007 surveillance program known as Prism, whose existence was revealed by Edward Snowden back in 2013.
Schrems wants more than just monetary compensation
The plaintiffs also demand $539 (€500) each for having their data collected without their consent.
But money is not the only reason behind Mr. Schrems’ decision to take the matter to court.
He declared that he wants to put an end once and for all to what he refers to as Facebook’s mass surveillance and to make sure that citizens’ data is perfectly safe, "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."
It was also reported that Facebook claimed that the class-action was irrelevant under Austrian law, but Schrems’ lawyers are trying to have this dismissed.
What determined the Austrian to initiate this fight for data privacy was the fact that he had studied abroad for some time at a university in Silicon Valley and he was deeply intrigued and annoyed by the fact that "the general approach in Silicon Valley is that you can do anything you want in Europe."
To him, it looks like the American companies are looking down on Europe, thinking they can get away with anything without facing the consequences.
As expected, Facebook has made no commentaries on the issue.