UK class action lodged against Meta seeks $3.1Bn for breach of competition law

Effectively, it’s saying Facebook took all the personal and private data of its users — who, due to Facebook’s dominance, had no other viable social platform — and in return all its users got, in effect, was the ability to post pictures of babies and kittens to their friends and families.The action is being mounted by international competition law expert Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen (pictured above) who has made submissions before the U.K.’s Parliament regarding Facebook’s market dominance, as well as written academic legal papers about it.Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s case rests on the idea that Facebook (recently renamed Meta) set an “unfair price” for U.K. Facebook users.The “price” set for granting access to the social network was the surrender of U.K. users’ highly valuable personal data, who in return simply got “free” access to Facebook’s social networking platform, no financial compensation, all while Facebook generated billions in revenues.Key to the case’s argument is that Facebook “surrounded” its U.K. users not just by locking them and their data into its platform, but also by tracking them via the Facebook pixel, on other websites, thus generating deep “social graph” data about its users.Germain to Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s argument is that user profiles resurfaced time and again in controversies, such as during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, further illustrating their market exploitation.Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s lawyers, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, have written to Meta to notify them of the claim.