Facebook faces class action lawsuit over personal data leakage of 533 million users

A class-action lawsuit is being filed against Facebook over the data breach scandal of 533 million users. The main purpose of the claim is to obtain compensation for a violation of the rules to protect personal information. Writes about this TechCrunch.

The lawsuit is being filed for violation of Article 82 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which provides for the right to compensation in the event of violations. The law came into force in 2018, and, as the newspaper notes, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in claims in this area.

The lawsuit is being prepared by an organization called Digital Rights Ireland. Its members urge users living in the European Union to check their accounts for hacking through a special website and join the lawsuit if they have suffered. The scope and conditions of the claims were not specified. Speaking to RTE, a DRI spokesman said he believes paying compensation to victims is the best way to get IT giants to comply with the law.

Facebook said it understands users’ concerns and is committed to providing maximum security for its customers. “As the experience of Clubhouse and LinkedIn has shown, no company can fully protect itself from parsing or data leaks. That is why we are allocating serious funds to combat violations and improve work in this direction, ”said representatives of the social network.

Recall that information about the information leak appeared in early April. A database with 533 million records of personal data of Facebook users has been published on the Web. The company said that the published information is not related to hacking – this is the result of collecting data from the platform before September 2019.

After the incident, the Irish regulator announced plans to conduct an audit following the leak. If the company is found guilty, then in addition to damages in a class-action lawsuit, Facebook could face a fine of up to 4% of its annual revenue.

So far, the only fine for violating the GDPR has been received by the social network Twitter. The size was far from the maximum allowable – the company was ordered to pay € 450 thousand, which is only 0.1% of income.