Lawyers are preparing a class action lawsuit in Great Britain against the local branch of Facebook’s parent company Meta. Competition expert Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen from the British Institute of International and Comparative Law wants to work with lawyers from a lawsuit fund to sue for damages for 44 million users – the lawyer believes that this could total up to 2.756 billion euros.
“Abused dominance”
Lovdahl-Gormsen said the company had “abused its dominant position” to dictate terms and conditions for the use of personal data to British users. With the data collected in the period from 2015 to 2019, Facebook received a detailed picture of the Internet use of those affected and made “excessive profits”.
Lovdahl-Gormsen criticizes, among other things, “Facebook Pixel” – JavaScript code for website owners, with the help of which the user behavior of the site visitors can be tracked. Lovdahl-Gormsen explained that anyone living in the UK who used Facebook at least once during the period in question could claim compensation from Facebook.
No guarantee of success
Although the lawsuit is being planned jointly with an experienced British law firm, there is no guarantee of success for the class action. As the BBC reports, the London Supreme Court had already dismissed a lawsuit against Google in November 2021. In the case, Google was accused of illegally monitoring millions of iPhones. Another class action lawsuit brought against Google by a UK association for bypassing Apple’s Safari browser cookie block was also dismissed in 2018.
(mack)