A seemingly unlikely hearing will take place next April in Vienna, where 25,000 citizens will be confronted by their legal representatives with the Facebook, alleging that the social media giant violated their personal data. The case is known as "Europe vs Facebook", but has been aptly described by foreign media as "a David vs Goliath case". The initiator of this movement, as reported in a relevant report in "Vima tis Kyriakis", is Austrian student Max Schrems, who is demanding compensation of 500 euros from Mark Zuckerberg's company for each of his 25,000 supporters. The amount is symbolic (although for Facebook itself, if it were forced to pay it in full, it would be significant), but a potential victory for the plaintiffs would open the floodgates for Internet companies and the way they manage their users' personal data. Schrems claims that Facebook violates European law by monitoring the movements of its users on external pages, using Big Data Systems. He also claims that the company provided this data to the US National Security Agency (NSA), as part of its Prism spying program. On April 9, the Vienna Regional Court will examine the case in a first hearing and decide whether it will be accepted.However, this is not the first time that Schrems has clashed with Facebook. In 2013, he filed a lawsuit against the company for its involvement in the Prism spying program, while in 2011 he became world-famous when he became the first European to ask Facebook to reveal all the data it had on him – a request for which he received a volume of 1,222 pages!
Source: newsbeast.gr
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