Italian court allows Meta class action

A Milan court has cleared a class action against Meta over Facebook data scraping, opening the case to millions of users in Italy. (reuters.com) The order came on Tuesday, April 14, after a claim by the CTCU consumer association, a South Tyrol-based group also known in Italian as Centro Tutela Consumatori Utenti. The court said the case can proceed over personal data taken from Facebook Italy users. (reuters.com) (consumer.bz.it) The underlying incident was not a one-day hack but large-scale “scraping,” a technique that collects data from profiles by automating ordinary site features at high speed. Meta said in April 2021 that the exposed dataset covered information from more than 530 million users and came from a vulnerability it fixed in 2019. (about.fb.com) The Milan court order said the scraping ran from January 2018 to September 2019 and affected about 533 million Facebook users worldwide. A legal source cited by Reuters estimated that roughly 35 million users in Italy could fall within the case. (reuters.com) The claim is built around the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the privacy law that requires companies to protect personal information by design and by default. CTCU said it is seeking compensation for users who lost, or feared losing, control of their data. (reuters.com) (consumer.bz.it) European regulators have already punished Meta over the same episode. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said in November 2022 that it fined Meta Platforms Ireland 265 million euros and ordered corrective measures after finding failures tied to Facebook search and contact-import tools. (dataprotection.ie) CTCU argues that Facebook’s default settings made some profile data searchable by “everyone,” which it says helped fuel the leak. The group has framed the case as a test of whether platform design choices can trigger collective compensation claims in Italy. (consumer.bz.it) Meta is pushing back on the ruling. A company spokesperson told Reuters that the decision was “a procedural ruling only” and “makes no finding that Meta violated any law,” and said Meta believes the case should be dismissed. (reuters.com) The Milan decision does not decide liability or damages, but it moves a long-running 2018-2019 data scandal into Italy’s collective-action system. The next fight is likely to center on how many users join the case and whether the court treats scraped data as compensable privacy harm. (reuters.com)