A Milan court on Tuesday accepted a class action brought by a consumer group against Meta Platforms over the theft of personal data suffered by Facebook Italy.
According to the court order, the data scraping incident, which took place between January 2018 and September 2019 and was disclosed by Meta in 2021, affected around 533 million Facebook users globally.
The CTCU consumer association is seeking compensation on behalf of social media users who lost, or feared losing, control over their personal data in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
A legal source estimated that around 35 million Facebook users in Italy could potentially be affected by the data scraping.
“We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision, which is a procedural ruling only and makes no finding that Meta violated any law,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We are confident this meritless action will ultimately be dismissed,” the spokesperson added.
(Reporting by Claudia Cristoferi, editing by Alvise Armellini and Keith Weir)
