The Consumers’ Association and the Data Privacy Foundation have sued Facebook in an attempt to compel the social networking company to compensate users for violating their privacy. The union calls on consumers to support the action.
The amount of the financial compensation is not yet known. “We believe that Facebook should come up with an arrangement that provides sufficient compensation for what the platform did wrong”, thus the Consumers’ Association. If necessary, the association wants to enforce compensation through the courts. Users who are Sign Up do not have to pay anything for this; after registration they will be kept informed of the progress of the promotion.
The Consumers’ Association works together with the Data Privacy Foundation. This is late last year by legal experts, including former VVD politician Benk Korthals, a foundation that aims to ‘protect the rights of individuals against unlawful privacy violations’. The foundation tries to achieve this by instituting proceedings and through legally binding, collective settlements.
The association and the foundation accuse Facebook of making private data of users accessible to third parties for years and making money from it, without asking permission from those users and also without properly informing them about this. The association refers to an investigation by the Dutch Data Protection Authority, which concluded in 2017 that Facebook has essential information about its own privacy policy not provided.
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