- Meta Platforms, Inc META Facebook urged a London tribunal to block a collective lawsuit worth up to £3 billion ($3.7 billion) for allegedly abusing its influence to monetize users' data.
- The social media giant faced a mass action from around 45 million Facebook users in Britain, Reuters reports.
- Legal academic Liza Lovdahl Gormsen alleged that Facebook deprived users of compensation for using their data through its dominant position.
- Also Read: Meta Takes Legal Action Against Voyager Labs, Accuses It For Alleged Data Scraping
- Gormsen's lawyers urged the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case under the U.K.'s collective proceedings regime, roughly equivalent to the class action regime in the U.S.
- Ronit Kreisberger, representing Lovdahl Gormsen, told the tribunal, "Meta's data practices violate the prohibition on abusive conduct by dominant firms."
- But lawyers representing Meta said the lawsuit wrongly assumes that any "excess profits" it might make equates to a financial loss suffered by individual Facebook users.
- Last August, Meta reached a $37.5 million settlement regarding a 2018 lawsuit alleging Facebook of tracking user movements through their smartphones without permission.
- The lawsuit claimed that Facebook violated California law and privacy policy by gathering data from users who turned off Location Services on their mobile devices.
- Meta is involved in many other lawsuits globally, including regulatory action for allegedly abusing its dominant position.
- Meta held $41.78 billion in cash and equivalents as of September 30.
- Price Action: META shares traded lower by 2.56% at $147.85 on the last check Monday.
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