Facebook on Monday asked a London tribunal to block a collective lawsuit valued at up to GBP 3 billion over allegations the social media giant abused its dominant position to monetise users' personal data.
Meta, the parent company of the Facebook group, is facing a
mass action brought on behalf of around 45 million Facebook users in Britain.
Legal academic Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, 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.
Her lawyers said users should get compensation for the
economic value they would have received if Facebook was not in a dominant
position in the market for social networks.
But Meta said 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.
Lovdahl Gormsen's lawyers on Monday asked the Competition
Appeal Tribunal to certify the case under the UK's collective proceedings
regime – which is roughly 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.
Ronit Kreisberger, representing Lovdahl Gormsen, 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 – GBP 3 billion, including interest – is “at the very least wildly
inflated”. © Reuters