On Monday, Facebook asked a London tribunal to block a collective lawsuit valued at up to 3 billion pounds ($3.7 billion) over allegations the social media giant abused its dominant position to monetise users’ personal data.
Source: Business Today India
The parent company of the Facebook group, Meta Platforms Inc, is facing a mass action brought on behalf of around 45 million Facebook users in Britain.
Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a legal academic 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.
According to her lawyers, users should be compensated for the economic value they would have received if Facebook was not in a dominant presiding in the market for social networks.
But as per Meta, the lawsuit was “entirely without merit” and should not be allowed to proceed. Its lawyers said the claimed losses ignore the “economic value” Facebook provides.
On Monday, Lovdahl Gormsen’s lawyers asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case under the UK’s collective proceedings regime – which is approximately equivalent to the class action regime in the United States.
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.
Representing Lovdahl Gormsen, Ronit Kreisberger 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.
But 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.
This approach “takes no account whatsoever of the significant economic value of the service provided by Facebook”, Marie Demetriou said in court documents. She said Lovdahl Gormsen’s estimate of potential claimants’ total losses – 3 billion pounds, including interest – is “at the very least wildly inflated”.