Europe vs. Facebook: Law Student Raising Funds for Privacy Campaign
By Karla Robinson
November 20, 2012
November 20, 2012
- In what started as a class assignment, Austrian law student Max Schrems from the University of Vienna is fighting Facebook for “right of access,” a European privacy principle that allows users to request all the data an EU entity has about them.
- Schrems formed an advocacy group called “Europe vs. Facebook,” encouraging Facebook users worldwide to request copies of their data. He has sent complaints to the Irish Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) to force Facebook to comply with EU law.
- “Just this month,” Ars Technica writes, “Facebook changed the way it presents privacy information to new users, largely at the suggestion of the ODPC. Back in September, Facebook said it would disable facial recognition for European users, also under pressure from Irish authorities.”
- “[Schrems] is now going to have to sue not only Facebook, but also the ODPC to say that it has imposed too low a threshold. That’s a very, very hard standard to meet,” says Eoin O’Dell, an Irish law professor. “…it’s a very important social strategy [in terms of public awareness], but on the legal side I think it’s going to be very hard to win now that there has been significant engagement [from Facebook] with the ODPC and vice versa.”
- Schrems is trying to raise $384,000 to fund the multi-year legal battle “that might significantly redefine how Facebook controls the personal data on over one billion people worldwide,” suggests the article.
- “We do have privacy laws which, by the letter of the law, are rather strict. In the end we’re not really enforcing it right now — that’s the politically interesting thing about the Facebook case,” notes Schrems. “To me it’s an experiment; you have a win-win outcome. On the one hand, Facebook gets off the hook and that would be great, because then we have to change the law. Or [on the other hand] it’s a landmark case, saying actually there is enforcement.”
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