In this January 14, 2022, report for Newsweek, Jack Dutton reports on the class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook and its parent company, Meta, for harvesting the data of its 44 million British users.

According to Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen, an international competition law expert, Facebook sent an “unfair price” for British users of social media as they were asked to surrender their data in exchange for the free use of social media platforms. Lovdahl-Gormsen claims that “Facebook locked UK users and their data on their platform and also tracked them via Facebook pixel, on other websites, to provide in-depth ‘social graph’ data about its users”.

If Meta loses this lawsuit, they stand to pay $3.1 billion in damages.

Editor’s Note: We’ve all known for a long time that Facebook has been harvesting and monetizing the personal data of its users. British users are lucky because there are lawyers in their midst who are able to willing to take on these cases against multinational companies.

What about users in other countries, for example, the Philippines, where a large portion of the population are Facebook users?^[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139972/share-of-facebook-users-by-age-philippines/ Will this lawsuit change Facebook’s practices? We highly doubt it. Also, what is US$3.1 billion compared to the company’s current net worth of US$128.290 billion?^[2]https://theirnetworth.com/facebook-net-worth/

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