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from the it-ain't-over-until-there's-a-Zuckerberg-apology dept.
Facebook £3bn legal action given go-ahead in London:
A judge has given the go-ahead to a mass legal action against Facebook owner Meta, potentially worth £3bn.
The case is being brought by legal academic Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, on behalf of 45 million Facebook users.
Her original claim was refused, in 2023, but a revised version has now been accepted, with early 2026 said to be the latest it could be heard.
Meta said the claims "remain entirely without merit and we will vigorously defend against them".
The new claim says: "Facebook has struck an unfair bargain with its users," according to legal documents.
Facebook abused its dominance by making users give it their data from non-Facebook products, including Meta-owned Instagram and other third-party sites.
And sharing data with third parties had become "a condition of accessing the Facebook platform, pursuant to a 'take-it-or-leave-it' offer".
[...] Meta said the "fundamental concerns identified by the tribunal in its February 2023 judgement have not been resolved".
It was "committed to giving people meaningful control" of the information they shared on its platforms and to "invest heavily to create tools that allow them to do so."
The legal action is being funded by Innsworth, a company backed by an investment management fund, which has also funded mass legal actions against Mastercard, Ericsson and Volkswagen.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2024, @08:37AM (1 child)
Otherwise, I don't care, store as much of my fake data as you can.
Don't be like those children who want to use certain sites but can't because they keep clicking on the "below 18" button or giving their actual birth date.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2024, @12:38PM
Apropos of nothing in particular
There once was a UK site where you could, if you were so inclined, get in touch with the people you were once at school with. At the time it launched, yr humble scribe was a sysadmin, with added postmaster@ duties, and it was in that role I first became aware of said site as my spam filter started 'quarantining' contact emails from their domain based on their content...I had to put in a general exemption for their domain from filtering - far be it for me to spoil the PHBs fun by blocking his old school flames from contacting him, wanting to hook up again.
I looked into the site, got a strong 'Danger Will Robinson' vibe about the scope and nature of the data they were collecting, didn't trust the buggers or their setup, so created a fake account on their site - bogus name, bogus DOB, but listing the real schools I attended as a callow youth and had set up a spamtrap bogus.name@domain to use as the contact email, set up a number of specific filter rules for that email address then sat back and monitored.
Around the second month the spamtrap account received a rather interesting email - informing me that I was an imposter, and no-one of that name or date of birth ever attended any of those schools.
I merrily responded that even though I had indeed attended the schools in question, they were factually correct about the name and DOB I used being bogus, and whilst I knew this to be the case, being their creator, could they please explain to me how exactly they knew?
That was decades ago, I'm still waiting for an answer to that one.