Did Facebook use its dominate market position to monetise users personal information?

Did Facebook use its dominate market position to monetise users personal information?

45 million Facebook users in Britain think so, and have banned together to raised a lawsuit against  Facebook’s parent company Meta Inc.

Facebook on Monday asked a London tribunal to block the collective lawsuit valued at A$5.25 billion.

Lawyers representing Meta said the lawsuit wrongly assumes that any “excess profits” it might make equates to a financial loss suffered by individual Facebook users.

Legal academic Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, who is bringing the case, said Facebook users were not properly compensated for the value of personal data that they had to provide to use the platform.

Her lawyers said users should get compensation for the economic value they would have received if Facebook was not in a dominant position in the market for social networks.

A decision to certify collective proceedings will depend on whether the tribunal decides that the individual cases can appropriately be dealt with together, rather than on their merits.

Ronit Kreisberger, representing Gormsen, told the tribunal that “Meta’s data practices violate the prohibition on abusive conduct by dominant firms”.

“There is unquestionably a case for Meta to answer at trial,” Kreisberger argued.

- CyberBeat