The Austrian Supreme Court is due to rule in early 2016 whether the 25,000 complainants who have rallied behind privacy advocate Max Schrems will be able to file a group class action lawsuit against social media giant Facebook. Mr Schrems, an Austrian citizen, filed a lawsuit against Facebook Ireland in June 2014, accusing the company of violating European privacy laws in its handling of users' personal data on Facebook. The Vienna Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Mr Schrems last month on 20 of the 22 cases brought forward, but has deferred to the Supreme Court to decide whether other potential litigants can join with Schrems in a class action. It is understood that Schrems is seeking €500 in damages for every complainant, totalling over €12.5 million in potential damages for the 25,000-plus people looking to join the lawsuit.

Making history

Mr Schrems has already had a hand in privacy law history. In October this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Safe Harbour data privacy and handling agreement between the United States and the European Union 'invalid', an opinion that came in response to Mr Schrems complaints against the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland. The Irish Commissioner had previously rejected Mr Schrems' complaint against Facebook, whose European headquarters are in Ireland. 'If the Austrian Supreme Court or the European Court of Justice allows the lawsuit, Mr Schrems may write a little bit of legal history in the privacy field for the second time,' commented Roland ProzessFinanz chief executive Arndt Eversberg, whose company is funding Mr Schrems' case against Facebook.

The only reasonable way 

Reportedly, Mr Schrems' inspiration for the case against Facebook came from a talk given by the company's privacy lawyer Ed Palmieri in 2011, from which, he has suggested, he realised that Facebook's handling of personal data did not comply with the European Union's privacy laws. As the lawsuit awaits clearance from the Austrian Supreme Court, Mr Schrems' believes he has EU law on his side to put the complaints forward as a class action or model case lawsuit. 'It would not make a lot of sense for the court or the parties before it to file these claims as thousands of individual lawsuits—which we can still do if a class action is not allowed,' Mr Schrems commented this week, concluding that a class action lawsuit was both legal and 'the only reasonable way' to process the thousands of 'identical privacy violations' of which Facebook stands accused. Source: Global Research