One Facebook user wins €5,000 from Meta — thousands could seek damages

In a lawsuit against Meta, the 5th Civil Chamber of the Leipzig Regional Court has awarded a Facebook user €5,000 in compensation for data protection violations.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has developed business tools for tracking active users on its social media platforms.

Meta can identify every user individually and at any time. Users don’t even have to be logged in on their Facebook or Instagram accounts – as soon as they move to a third-party website or use an app, they’re being monitored.

The data that’s being collected is then sent to countries all over the world, especially to the United States.

According to the Leipzig Regional Court, Meta’s business tools massively violate European data protection laws and process personal data to profile Facebook users. At the same time, Meta is making billions in profits with personalized ads.

Furthermore, Meta’s data-collecting process is particularly extensive in that it affects nearly unlimited amounts of data and results in almost complete monitoring of the user’s online behavior. Among large groups of users, this leads to a feeling that their entire private lives are continuously being monitored by Meta.

When determining the amount of the compensation, the court relied on Article 82 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which dictates the right to compensation and liability, as well as the value of personal data for showing targeted advertisements by Meta.

The court noted that Meta had an advertising turnover of $115 billion in 2021.

“The financial value of a single user profile, in which all data about the person is stored, is enormous in data processing markets,” the judge said in its verdict.

The plaintiff wasn’t heard by the court because “no further findings would have been expected beyond communicating the generally rather diffuse feeling of data loss and uncertainty.” Therefore, the court awarded the complainant €5,000 in compensation.

The court says it’s aware of the consequences of its decision.

“Even if it could lead to many Facebook users filing a lawsuit without explicitly explaining individual damage, this does not contradict the legislative goals of the GDPR, especially through private enforcement, to effectively enforce data protection in civil courts and thus beyond purely official measures,” the Leipzig Regional Court concluded in its ruling.