Skip to footer

How does one Austrian data activist take on Facebook?

Austrian law student Max Schrems launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook last week and has since garnered 25,000 plaintiffs. 

|
Provided by Europe v. Facebook
Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, announced Friday that he will be bringing a class action lawsuit against Facebook for violating privacy laws in Europe.
  • By Reuters

| VIENNA

Data protection activists challenging Facebook in a Vienna court said on Wednesday they had closed the list of plaintiffs after 25,000 people joined a campaign alleging that the social media giant had violated users' privacy.

"We hoped for broad support, but the number ... has exceeded my most optimistic expectations," said Austrian law student Max Schrems, who launched his class action only last Thursday.

Schrems, 26, has enlisted the public to help him take on Facebook, a U.S.-listed company worth $189 billion with 1.32 billion users across the globe.

"With this number of participants, we have a great basis to stop complaining about privacy violations and actually do something about it," he said in a statement.

Schrems said he had closed the list of plaintiffs because his legal team needed to verify and administer each claim that Facebook users submitted. Others can still register at www.fbclaim.com should the class action expand later.

Under Austrian law, a group of people may transfer their financial claims to a single person - in this case, Schrems. Legal proceedings are then effectively run as a class action.

Schrems is claiming damages of 500 euros ($667) per user for alleged data violations by Facebook, including by aiding the U.S. National Security Agency in running its PRISM program, which mined the personal data of users of Facebook and other web services.

Austrian law is generally favorable to data privacy, but Schrems is also seeking injunctions under EU data protection law at the court in Vienna.

Schrems already has a case involving the social network pending at the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg, France.

Facebook, which has declined comment on Schrems's campaign, has been accused before of violating data protection laws.

Most recently, Britain's data watchdog has begun investigating the legality of a Facebook experiment on unwitting users in 2012, in which it altered their feeds to see if changes in the amount of positive news they were shown had an influence on the positivity of their postings.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to How does one Austrian data activist take on Facebook?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0808/How-does-one-Austrian-data-activist-take-on-Facebook
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe