The lawsuit is for participation in the NSA’s PRISM dragnet surveillance program, among other alleged data protection violations. The suit was originally filed in Vienna’s Commercial Court but that court rejected it and referred it on to the regional court.
The civil suit targets Facebook Ireland, the social network’s Irish subsidiary and the location of its European headquarters. The Irish Data Protection Commission has previously audited Facebook’s practices back in 2011 and 2012 to comply with regional data protection requirements.
Add to that, a report into Facebook’s revised privacy policy, commissioned by Belgium’s data protection authority, asserted it violates European consumer protection law in a number of ways, including failure to secure valid consent from users to the processing of their data.
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