Yet another item has popped up on Facebook’s collective News Feed that the company now known as Meta can’t like: the announcement of a class-action lawsuit in the UK seeking £2.3 billion ($3.15 billion), plus interest, in damages.
The claim being advanced by Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a senior fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, alleges that Facebook stuck its 44 million UK users with an abusive deal made possible by a monopoly on social networking: Give us all your data, and we’ll keep all the profits.
“By exploiting users’ data, both within the Facebook platform and off-platform through mechanisms like the Facebook Pixel, the company was able to build very detailed pictures of users’ internet usage,” says Facebook Claim, a site launched to explain the lawsuit. “By using deep data profiles of its users, the company generated excessive profits.”
The suit claims these damages on behalf of Facebook users in the UK between October 2015 and December 2019; those people do not need to opt into the lawsuit but may opt out.
The site does not feature the complaint itself, and as of 5 p.m. London time, the case had yet to be listed on the site of the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the forum in which this case will be heard under the UK’s Competition Act.
“The case will be filed imminently,” Valerie Oladeinde, a publicist working for this campaign, wrote in an email.
The Facebook Claim site doesn’t show the work behind that damages claim, and Oladeinde only said it reflects “the current quantum figure for setting an ‘unfair price.’”
Over the four years and change covered in the lawsuit, Facebook’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show considerable growth in average revenue per user as calculated over broad geographic areas. In the last quarter of 2015, the company reported $4.50 in ARPU across Europe, or $1.50 a month; by the fourth quarter of 2019, it reported ARPU across Europe of $13.21, or $4.40 a month.
The launch of this campaign comes only days after a renewed and more serious headache on the other side of the Atlantic. On Tuesday, the US District Court for the District of Columbia allowed the Federal Trade Commission to go ahead with its own antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. In his 48-page opinion, Judge James Boasberg rejected Facebook’s motion to dismiss the case, writing that the FTC had sufficiently documented its claim that Facebook holds a monopoly on personal social networking and could advance its argument for remedies, including the forced divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp.
