Facebook applied to a London court on Monday to file a class action lawsuit worth up to £3 billion (approx.
Metathe parent company of the Facebook group, there is a threat of class action lawsuits on behalf of around 45 million Facebook UK users.
Legal scholar Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, who is bringing the case, said Facebook users were not adequately compensated for the value of the personal data they had to provide to use the platform.
Her lawyers said users should be compensated for the economic value they would have received if Facebook were not dominant in the social networking market.
But Meta said the lawsuit was “completely without merit” and should not proceed. His lawyers said the alleged losses ignore the “economic value” Facebook offers.
Lovdahl Gormsen’s lawyers on Monday asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case under the UK’s class action system – which approximates the class action system in the United States.
A decision to allow a class proceeding will depend on whether the arbitral tribunal decides that the individual cases can reasonably be dealt with together, and not on their merits.
Ronit Kreisberger, representing Lovdahl Gormsen, told the tribunal that “Meta’s data practices violate the prohibition on abusive behavior by dominant companies”.
“There is undoubtedly a case in which Meta has to answer in court,” argued Kreisberger.
But attorneys representing Meta said the lawsuit wrongly assumes that any “excess profit” it could make equals a financial loss suffered by individual Facebook users.
This approach “does not in any way take into account the significant economic value of the service provided by Facebook,” Marie Demetriou said in court filings.
She said Lovdahl Gormsen’s estimate of potential claimants’ total losses – £3bn, including interest – was “at the very least grossly overstated”.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
