The well-known social network Facebook, the “hard core” of its parent Meta, is in a complicated situation in the United Kingdom, since a class action lawsuit has been filed against it accusing it of abuse of a dominant position and exploit the personal data of 44 million users. This demand amounts to an amount of 3,200 million dollars, which is equivalent to more than 2,300 million pounds, and about 2,790 million euros.
As we are told from Reuters, the lawsuit has been filed by Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, principal adviser to the control body of the UK Financial Conduct Authority, known as FCA for its acronym in English. She is also an expert in Competition Law, and who will take care of acting On behalf of everyone in the UK who used Facebook between 2015 and 2019. He believes that Facebook made billions of pounds by imposing unfair conditions on its users.
Liza Lovdahl Gormsen was quite clear when talking about this case, and what Facebook meant for the UK. In his opinion, this remained the only social network that allowed any user to connect with friends and family directly, without having to resort to any other solution. This seemed good, but it had a dark side, and it is that, according to Liza, it allowed Facebook to abuse its dominant position to impose unfair conditions of use with which to effortlessly exploit the personal data of users.
That is one of the most important keys to class action, the possibility of imposing “draconian terms of use” to Facebook users because this was, in the end, the only truly interesting and useful social network for the British. The idea of exploitation of personal data is associated not only with that use of a dominant position, but also with the concept of “abuse” in reference to conditions that were totally unfair.
In her argument, Liza also said that Facebook collected data within its platform in many different ways, including the well-known facebook pixel, which has become one of the great stars of personalized advertising, creating dynamic ads and compiling useful statistics to obtain user profiles.
Facebook has defended itself by saying that users of its social network they choose it because it offers them a certain value, and because they have “significant” control of the information they share, both with Meta and with other companies. I am not going to enter into controversy on this subject, there are already many open, but what is clear is that the lawsuit does not come at a good time, since Facebook has just failed in its attempt to annul an antitrust lawsuit that comes from the FTC of U.S.
