Facebook targeted by a collective complaint in Spain

A Spanish consumer organization announced Wednesday, May 30, that it would file a collective complaint against the social network Facebook, accused of illegally exploiting the personal data of users, and claim "at least 200 euros" compensation per user .
In a statement, the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) said that by filing a complaint, it "will represent not only the users affected by the scandal Cambridge Analytica but all users of Facebook in Spain" , or 26 million people.

The organization says it is acting jointly with other consumer groups in Portugal (Deco-Protest), Belgium (Test-atachts) and Italy (Altroconsumo). OCU "considers that Facebook has broken the data protection law, by not informing and not requesting the authorization of users" to make use of it.

Flaws in the protection of personal data
On May 22, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the European Parliament, as he did to US parliamentarians , for the weaknesses of his social network in protecting the data of its users, illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The British company Cambridge Analytica is accused of having collected and exploited without their consent the personal data of 87 million users of Facebook for political purposes. The US justice investigation to establish if this information were notably used to develop software to predict and influence the votes of voters in the United States before the election victory of Donald Trump.

On Monday, a French Internet advocacy organization, La Quadrature du Net, announced that it had filed five collective complaints against Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn, accusing them of illegally exploiting the personal data of their users. These complaints are in addition to those filed in several countries by the young Austrian lawyer Max Schrems, a privacy activist.