On April 9, 2015, the Vienna Regional Court (Landesgericht) heard the first hearing (vorbereitende Tagsatzung) of the class action claiming that Facebook breached EU privacy laws.
The class action claims that Facebook Ireland:
- has a data use policy that violates EU law;
- does not provide users with the possibility to express effective consent to several types of data usages;
- supported the NSA’s ‘PRISM’ surveillance program;
- tracks users on external websites (e.g. through ‘Like buttons’);
- monitors and analyses users through ‘big data’ systems;
- unlawfully introduced the ‘Graph Search;
- passes users’ data on to external applications without authorization.
In the hearing, the Court heard a number of procedural objections by Facebook, which also held that Vienna is not the competent jurisdiction. A decision on the jurisdiction shall be delivered in writing.
More information on the class actions can be found at https://www.fbclaim…
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