Austrian Supreme Court to decide on admissibility of Shrems’s class-action suit

Austria's Supreme Court will decide on the admissibility of Austrian student Max Schrems's attempt to bring a class-action lawsuit against Facebook over its privacy policies. The court will decide whether such collective legal action was allowed, Scrhem's group said yesterday.
The law student is claiming €500 in damages each for the over 25,000 signatories to his lawsuit.

The issue was whether the claims could be consolidated into one in Austrian courts. An appellate court held Schrems could file a personal claim but not a class action to form, his Europe-vs-Facebook group.

"It would not make a lot of sense for the court or the parties before it to file these claims as thousands of individual lawsuits, which we can still do if a 'class action' is not allowed," Schrems said in a statement.

"We therefore think that the 'class action' is not only legal but also the only reasonable way to deal with thousands of identical privacy violations by Facebook."

Facebook, with its international headquarters in Ireland, denied any wrongdoing and sought to block a class action suit.

Ireland's High Court last month ordered Facebook's transfer of EU users' data to be probed to ensure personal privacy was properly protected from US government surveillance.