A German court ruled in a landmark judgment that Facebook users whose personal data was accessed lawfully between 2018 and 2019 are entitled to compensation, irrespective of whether they can prove financial loss.
Meta Fails to Defend Data Leak Case Versus German Court
The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled on Monday, Nov. 18 that private people who lose control over their data through unauthorized access are authorized to claim damages.
As a result, this judgment will allow thousands of German Facebook users to claim damages from the platform for having failed to protect their data after a massive breach of the social network's security, Bloomberg reports.
Previous Facebook Data Breach Was Massive
The second data breach that occurred between 2018 and 2019 was through third parties guessing phone numbers to access Facebook users' accounts.
Facebook friend search, which enabled users to discover and connect with people with matching phone numbers, was reportedly associated with the breach. Thus, unauthorized access opened up much sensitive personal information and raised alarms on the platform's security measures.
Approximately six million Facebook users in Germany were impacted by the breach, which was followed by widespread outcry about privacy and the company's failure to protect user data.
As a consequence, various claimants filed lawsuits requesting compensation against Meta, Facebook's parent company, according to Reuters.
The Court Ruling on Compensation
Historically, the lower court had rejected such claims for damages, and the BGH's recent judgment was needed to re-orient this previous practice of dismissal, indicating that specific financial damage does not have to be proven in order to be compensated by a user.
Just losing one's control over personal data is enough, so the breach of the principle of privacy may easily lead to grave repercussions for the users.
In the case of a claimant who filed an action for 1,000 euros ($1,056) damages, the Supreme Court remarked that an amount of compensation of at least 100 euros would be sufficient since there was no concrete financial loss proved.
Meta was scathing in its criticism of the court rulings. A spokesperson noted that the BGH ruling is contrary to case law recently established by the European Court of Justice which is Europe's apex court. That notwithstanding, the tech giant is now staring at the possibility of paying back victims whose data was leaked in the breach.
The court also ordered the lower court to reassess the transparency and readability of Facebook's terms of use. This will determine if the users applied their informed consent for the use of their data by Facebook, which might complicate the situation even further for Meta.
The German court had been closely watching Facebook for the past years. In 2016, it fined the social media app $109,000 for failing to tackle intellectual property concerns.
Just earlier this month, South Korea fined Meta $15.67 million after it learned that the company collected and took user data without permission.
What's worse, Meta only had a vague set of policies about user data collection. This has added fuel to the fire, pushing Korea to press charges against the company.
