Facebook was facing a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit prepared by a British competition law expert on Friday, according to which the American social network abused its dominant position with “abusive” clauses.
This expert, Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, announced that she would file a lawsuit against Meta, the group that owns Facebook, in the British competition court, asking for a minimum of 2.3 billion pounds (3.2 billion dollars, 2.8 billion euros) in damages and harm to British users of the network.
“More than 44 million Britons could be compensated,” the statement said.
A spokeswoman for Lovdahl Gormsen, contacted by AFP, could not say exactly when the lawsuit would be filed, saying only that it was “imminent”.
This case “demonstrates for the first time that the tech giant has abused its dominant market position by imposing unfair conditions on UK users to exploit their personal data,” the statement said.
Lovdahl Gormsen’s lawyers, the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan firm, have already served Meta with notice of the lawsuit.
“People access our service for free,” a spokesman for the US tech giant told AFP. “They choose it because it provides a value service and they have significant control over what information they share on Meta platforms and with whom,” he added.
But, according to the lawsuit, it is “abusive” for British users to be forced to give up their personal data in order to access the network.
Users do not receive “any monetary reward while Facebook generates billions of revenue with their data,” he defends. “This unfair transaction is possible thanks to the dominant position of Facebook,” he stresses.
Meta is already facing antitrust lawsuits from the United States competition authority that could force it to divest itself of its Instagram and WhatsApp subsidiaries, the statement recalls.
The group is also the subject of a consumer class action lawsuit in the United States and actions by regulators around the world.
The British data protection regulator (ICO) announced in July its intention to impose a fine of 500,000 pounds (685,000 million dollars, 598,000 euros) on Facebook as a result of the Cambridge Analytica case, and the use of the data of millions of users. without your knowledge.
The social media giant was also denied in May by the Irish courts its request to block an investigation by the regulator in that country, which could lead to the paralysis of data transfers from the European Union to the United States.
