law students in austria challenge facebook privacy policy - nytimes
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12/5/12 Law Students in Austria Challenge Facebook Privacy Policy - NYTimes.com
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Max Schrems, a student at theUniversity of Vienna, said Facebook’sprivacy policies were too broad andviolated European law.
Law Students in Austria Challenge Facebook PrivacyPolicyBy KEVIN J. O’BRIENPublished: December 4, 2012
BERLIN — An Austrian student group said Tuesday that it planned
to challenge Facebook’s privacy policies in Irish court, alleging that
the social networking giant had failed, despite repeated requests and
formal complaints made by its members, to adapt to the restrictions
of European data protection law.
The group, which calls itself Europe
vs. Facebook, said it would begin
collecting donations to challenge the
policy in Ireland, where the company’s
European business is incorporated.
Max Schrems, an Austrian law
student at the University of Vienna
who organized the effort, said
Facebook had no interest in adapting
its service to meet stricter European
privacy requirements.
“We have been pursing this for more than a year with Facebook, but the company has
done only about 10 percent of what we had asked them to do,” said Mr. Schrems, 25.
“Therefore, we are preparing to go to court.”
Facebook, in a statement, said its European privacy policy had been vetted and approved
by Irish regulators and was in compliance with European law.
“The way Facebook Ireland handles personal data has been subject to thorough review by
the Irish Data Protection Commissioner over the past year,” the company said.
“Nonetheless, we have some vocal critics who will never be happy whatever we do and
whatever the D.P.C. concludes.”
Mr. Schrems’s group, which he said was made up of about 10 students at the University of
Vienna, filed 22 complaints in 2010 with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in
Ireland, which regulates Facebook’s European business because it is incorporated there.
As a result of those complaints, the regulator conducted a public audit of Facebook’s
privacy policies. In September it announced an agreement with the company that
required, among other changes, that Facebook shorten the time it retained consumer data
and refrain from building a photo archive on individuals without their prior consent.
But Mr. Schrems said in an interview that Facebook was still violating European law in
many areas, including a requirement that Facebook provide users who request it with a
full copy of all the data the company has collected on them. Mr. Schrems, a Facebook user
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12/5/12 Law Students in Austria Challenge Facebook Privacy Policy - NYTimes.com
2/3nytimes.com/2012/12/05/…/austrian-group-plans-court-challenge-to-facebooks-privacy-policies.html?…
A version of this article appeared in print on December 5, 2012, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: LawStudents in Austria Challenge Facebook Policy.
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since 2007, said he requested his own summary file from Facebook in 2010.
The company, whose global headquarters is in Menlo Park, California, responded by
creating a selfservice tool for users to extract the data, which Mr. Schrems said supplied
him only with information going back to 2010. In addition, he alleged that Facebook’s
privacy policy, which users are required to agree to before they can use the service, is too
broad and violates European law.
“It is basically a collection of American legalese, which is intentionally vague and gives the
company adequate leeway to do basically anything they want with your data,” Mr.
Schrems said.
Thilo Weichert, the data protection supervisor for the German state of SchleswigHolstein,
which has also brought legal action against Facebook, said he supported the Austrian
student group’s efforts.
“Facebook’s policy is much too vague and broad and does not conform with German or
European law,” Mr. Weichert said in an interview. “We think that European privacy
officials need to take common action on this.”
Mr. Weichert issued an administrative order in August 2011 that barred businesses in the
state, which is located along Germany’s northern border with Denmark, from using
Facebook’s social plugins like the Like button and Fan pages. The rationale for the order:
Those applications collect information on users without their consent by inserting cookies,
which track individual computers, through a user’s Web browser.
In November of last year, Mr. Weichert sued several local business organizations,
including the state’s own Industrie und Handelskammer, the equivalent of the local
chamber of commerce, for creating their own fan pages on Facebook. The chamber and
businesses that have not been identified have challenged that suit, which is pending in
court in Kiel.
The privacy policies of Facebook, Google and some other U.S.based Web companies have
come under increasing criticism in Europe.
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12/5/12 Law Students in Austria Challenge Facebook Privacy Policy - NYTimes.com
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