Loek Essers

Privacy campaign group Europe-v-Facebook is inviting Facebook users outside the United States and Canada to join a lawsuit against the company, which it alleges violates privacy laws. Europe-v-Facebook’s Max Schrems filed suit with the commercial court in Vienna, Austria, where he lives.

The suit accuses Facebook of “basic or obvious violations of the law.”

The alleged violations include the company’s privacy policy, its alleged participation in the Prism data collection program run by the US National Security Agency (NSA), its graph search; its tracking of users on third party websites, the use of “big data” systems that spy on users, and the company’s non-compliance with data access requests.

United States and European Union privacy and consumer groups called on privacy regulators to stop Facebook's plans to gather the Internet browsing patterns of its users while they visit other sites.

The groups, gathered in the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) to stop Facebook collecting the web browsing activities of Internet users in order to target advertising.

The groups also called on the FTC to examine whether Facebook's change in business practices violates a 2012 consent order between it and the FTC in a case involving the company's repeated sharing of information its users had asked to keep private

The Irish High Court has referred to a 14-year-old agreement governing the exchange of personal data between the European Union and the US to the EU’s top court.

The referral came in a case over whether the Irish Data Protection Commissioner was right to refuse to investigate Facebook’s alleged involvement with the US government surveillance program Prism.

Europe-v-Facebook, an Austrian group representing some Facebook users, filed a complaint with the Irish DPC over Facebook’s data exportation regime in June 2013. It argued that when Facebook collects user data and exports it to the US it is giving the US National Security Agency (NSA) the opportunity to use the data for massive surveillance of personal information without probable cause -- and by doing so, Facebook is violating European laws. European laws prohibit the transfer of personal data to non-EU countries that do not meet the EU’s standards for data protection.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has turned the European Union into a tapping "bazaar" in order to spy on as many EU citizens as possible, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said.

The NSA has been working with national security agencies in EU member states to get access to as much data of EU citizens as possible, Snowden said in a testimony sent to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The NSA has been pressuring EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance, according to Snowden. This is done through NSA's Foreign Affairs Division (FAD), he said, adding that lawyers from the NSA and GCHQ work very hard "to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers," he said.

The efforts to "interpret new powers out of vague laws" is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected, he said. Once the NSA has dealt with legal restrictions on mass surveillance in partner states, it pressures them to perform operations to gain access to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, Snowden said.

“The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements," Snowden said.

[March 7]