Facebook is facing a class-action lawsuit in the UK that could make its parent company Meta pay $3.1 billion to its UK users because it used their data without consent. The lawsuit claims 44 million British users should get money from Facebook because it took all of their personal and private information from 2015 to 2019. Facebook, which was recently renamed Meta, should according to the suit pay them. As of right now, Facebook hasn’t said anything about the case.
It’s said that because of Facebook’s power in the social media field, there was no other social media platform that people could use instead. As a result, the lawsuit says users could only use Facebook to send pictures to their family and friends. People in the UK who use Facebook were asked to give up their personal information in exchange for free access to the site, her lawsuit claims. She says that’s an “unfair price”.
The British public did not get any money back for giving their personal information to Facebook, even though the tech company made billions of dollars.
Lovdahl-Gormsen, an international competition lawyer, says Facebook kept UK users and their data on their platform and also tracked them through the Facebook “pixel” on other websites, so it could get more data about its users.
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that other websites can use to help them keep track of how many people click on Facebook ads and buy things from them. There were 44 million people who used Facebook at least once between October 1, 2015, and December 31, 2019 and the lawsuit argues that they should be paid for their data.
In addition to the consumer class action against Meta, an antitrust case by the FTC could force Facebook to sell its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. This comes just a few years after the Cambridge Analytica data-gathering scandal, which made Meta a lot of money. On Tuesday, a judge turned down Facebook’s second attempt to get the case dismissed.
