German justice handed down an important ruling against the Meta group on Monday, ruling that the parent company of Facebook was responsible for “moral harm” towards a user affected by a vast data leak dating from 2021. This decision will be decisive for thousands other cases in German courts, in a case that affected 533 million people in 106 countries.
The Federal Court of Justice has partially validated the appeal of a German Internet user whose first complaint before a court in western Germany was unsuccessful. This user demanded 1,000 euros from the American social network for not having taken “sufficient security measures” to protect his data.
“The simple loss of control of one’s own personal data following a violation of the GDPR (editor’s note: European data regulation)” constitutes “moral damage” which must be repaired, the court located in Karlsruhe ruled on Monday . Via a method known as “scraping”, people collected the data of Facebook users – telephone number, identity, place of work – before distributing it on the internet.
According to the press release, “it is not necessary (…) that there has been a concrete misuse of these data” for there to be damage estimated at “an order of magnitude of 100 euros” for the victim. The Federal Court sent the case back to the Cologne Court of Appeal, which will have to rule again, this time definitively.
In a reaction to AFP, Meta said he was “convinced” that the Cologne court “will rule again in (his) favor.” “We do not agree with (…) the Federal Court of Justice regarding the damages, which, in our opinion, are not in line with recent judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU,” adds Meta , pointing out that “similar claims have already been rejected more than 6,000 times by German courts” on the basis that there was “no valid claim for liability or damages.”
In Germany, nearly 6 million German accounts were affected by the leak, reports the German press. This data had been collected without Facebook’s knowledge in 2019 thanks to a security breach since closed, the network assured in 2021. Since 2021, Meta has regularly been fined hundreds of millions of euros in the EU for breaches. to data protection.
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