The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has announced that it intends to deliver a substantive ruling as soon as possible in legal disputes over damage claims following the massive data leak at Facebook in 2021. This makes VI. The Civil Senate, which is responsible for claims arising from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is using an entirely new legal option. According to the sections which were inserted in the Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) on October 24, the Federal Court can upgrade the appeal process pending before it to a major judgment case if the appeal raises a legal question whose decision is important to someone. Large number of proceedings.
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Thousands of Facebook users around the world have sued parent company Meta for scraping personal data. With the controversial technology, publicly visible data is automatically read in bulk from websites or open interfaces (APIs) and further processed on a large scale. As far as personal information is concerned, it is prohibited under the GDPR without the explicit consent of those affected. The cases that have reached BGH relate to the fact that in 2021 a total of approximately 533 million data sets containing personal information of Facebook users from 106 countries appeared online.
Unknown third parties had previously taken advantage of the fact that Facebook made it possible to locate the profile of the respective user using their telephone number, depending on their discoverability settings. Using automated tools, they uploaded telephone numbers en masse through the network operator’s contact import function, combined them with publicly available information about if they were linked to a user account, and then Accessed this data. The incident resulted in the Irish data protection authority DPC fining Meta 2022 €265 million.
fear, stress, loss of rest and time
In this country, plaintiffs claimed before several regional courts that Meta had not taken adequate security measures to prevent the exploitation of contactless devices. You are entitled to compensation for the inconvenience caused to you and non-material damages caused by losing control of your data. They may have faced fear, stress, loss of rest and time.
META is also obliged to compensate for all future material and non-material damage and issue a cease-fire declaration. The defendant rejected the alleged claims as there was no violation of the GDPR. The plaintiffs also did not suffer any direct loss.
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Higher regional courts assessed the damage claims differently, and several appeals ended up in the BGH (ref: VI ZR 22/24, VI ​​ZR 7/24 As well as VI ZR 10/24 and VI ZR 186/24). Meta then tried to circumvent the High Court rulings: the US company offered the plaintiffs an out-of-court settlement, which they accepted. As of now, BGH’s hands are tied.
New ZPO rules now allow Karlsruhe judges to decide on legal questions even if the appeal is actually off the table for procedural reasons. Its purpose is to enable prompt clarification by the Supreme Court even if the appeal is withdrawn for strategic reasons or due to a compromise. The substantive decision should accordingly have a symbolic effect, particularly for possible further litigation.
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accordingly Advanced Revision Process VI ZR 10/24 VI wants. Civil Senate is now clarifying whether the default setting of “all” made by Meta when implementing the contact import function is a violation of the GDPR. It also examines whether the mere loss of control over data that was scraped and no longer linked to the mobile phone number of the person concerned is likely to cause non-material damage within the meaning of the Regulation and what compensation might look like. BGH has it for November 11, 2024 date of oral hearing Scheduled.
The controversies surrounding Facebook are related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which came to light in 2018. In 2019, 419 million relevant data records appeared on the Internet. In early 2023, Meta sued companies like Voyager Labs and Bright Data in California that specialized in scraping. The mother of Facebook and Instagram has accused them of creating thousands of fake profiles on Facebook alone and collecting publicly visible data on users of the social network on a large scale and thus spying on the people affected and the service itself. Bright Data responded with countermeasures because public data on the platform is not Meta’s property. The group itself also used Bright Data services.
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