Facebook’s Win Sets Privacy Precedent

Quebec magistrate Michel Déziel, J.S.C. recently dismissed a class action lawsuit against Facebook over alleged consumer privacy law violations. “Quebec courts do not have jurisdiction on the litigation,” stated Deziel in his judgement. “All the users of Facebook accepted, while joining the site, to submit all the eventual recourses to the California courts of the district of Santa Clara. Customers are not subject to the direction of the Civil Code of Quebec since their adhesion to the site is free.”

Quebec civil law is based on French law and this Facebook victory establishes a case law precedent which may be used to challenge the jurisdiction of the impending European Union Data Privacy Directive in EU courts, using French legal principles.
The precedent grants Facebook the right to have privacy suits heard in an American court exclusively and also calls into question the ability of EU consumer privacy laws to truly impact American companies which utilize implicit “opt-in” rules for membership to free services.
Although Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission and EU justice commissioner, believes that EU rules ought to apply to European data “independently of the area of the world in which [Europeans’] data is being processed,” this is virtually unworkable on a country-by-country basis because the definition of consent for data usage varies by region.
The Facebook case may be used by other American firms operating abroad to support their claims that membership agreements and privacy policy acknowledgements are firm legal equivalents of data usage consent, and American court jurisdiction.
https://digiday.com/?p=5787

More in Media

Media Briefing: Efforts to diversify workforces stall for some publishers

A third of the nine publishers that have released workforce demographic reports in the past year haven’t moved the needle on the overall diversity of their companies, according to the annual reports that are tracked by Digiday.

Creators are left wanting more from Spotify’s push to video

The streaming service will have to step up certain features in order to shift people toward video podcasts on its app.

Digiday+ Research: Publishers expected Google to keep cookies, but they’re moving on anyway

Publishers saw this change of heart coming. But it’s not changing their own plans to move away from tracking consumers using third-party cookies.