Australian law graduate about the take on Facebook has 25,000 reasons to win

AN AUSTRALIAN law graduate spearheading a class-action suit against Facebook for alleged privacy breaches said ahead of the first hearing tomorrow he hopes the case will eventually lead to an overhaul of a “Wild West” approach to data protection.

Max Schrems and 25,000 other Facebook users are suing the social network for various rights violations, ranging from the “illegal” tracking of their data under EU law to Facebook’s involvement in the PRISM surveillance program of the US National Security Agency (NSA).

“Basically we are asking Facebook to stop mass surveillance, to (have) a proper privacy policy that people can understand, but also to stop collecting data of people that are not even Facebook users,” 27-year-old Schrems told AFP in an interview.

“There is a wide number of issues in the lawsuit and we hope to kind of win all of them and to get a landmark case against US data-gathering companies.” The case has been brought against Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, which registers all accounts outside the United States and Canada — making up some 80 per cent of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users.

Read more @ http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/australian-law-graduate-about-the-take-on-facebook-has-25000-reasons-to-win/story-fnjwnhzf-1227297576521


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~