The European Union’s highest court ruled Thursday that a complaint over Facebook’s use of people’s personal data is not legally valid — an apparent divergence of usual opinion, as governing bodies in the continent often crack down on U.S.-based tech companies.
Austrian Max Schrems, a privacy activist, attempted to go through with a class action lawsuit alleging that Facebook owes each one of his roughly 25,000 signees 500 euros because it misused their personal data. The European Court of Justice threw out the case, arguing that Schrems could only file on behalf of himself, according to the Financial Times.
Schrems said he plans to do so.
“For three years Facebook has been fighting nail and toe against the court’s jurisdiction in Austria and lost,” he said in a statement, according to Reuters. “Facebook will now have to explain to a neutral court whether its business model is in line with stringent European privacy laws.”
An Austrian court ruled in May that Facebook must remove certain forms of speech on the platform after the leader of the country’s Green party was insulted in certain posts, Reuters reported.
Facebook is presumably taking the ruling as win, especially since Europe, both on an individual state level and the larger EU, have been steadily getting more aggressive with companies and their purported liability for what’s on the respective platforms. (RELATED: Europe Vs. Silicon Valley: How The Continent Is Responding To Big Tech’s Growing Power)
Facebook itself is often a target.
Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, for example, somewhat recently accused Facebook of abusing its dominant stature in the market by collecting data on users via third-parties, among other complaints. The competition watchdog agency Bundeskartellamt presented its findings from an investigation lasting almost two years, according to Reuters, and declared that Facebook is violating the country’s laws when it gains access to massive amounts of data — even if the information is from Instagram and WhatsApp, two popular apps owned by the tech giant.
Facebook called the report “inaccurate” in a blog post directly responding to the allegations titled “Popularity Does Not Equal Dominance.”
Facebook did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment by time of publication.
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