Austrian student wins legal battle against Facebook

fuad lawal

October 8, 2015 4:21 PM

An Austrian law student's two-year battle against Facebook and mass U.S. surveillance culminated on Tuesday in a landmark ruling that has rippled across the business world.

Austrian Law student, Max Schrems

Max Schrems, 28, a Facebook user finishing his Ph.D in law at Vienna University, developed interest in the subject of privacy while studying for a semester abroad at Santa Clara University in California.

According to Huffington Post, the legal battle against mass U.S. surveillance that he pursued thereafter resulted in what lawyers called a "bombshell" ruling knocking down a data transfer framework between the European Union and the United States used by over 4,000 companies such as Google, Facebook and IBM.

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"Max Schrems and Edward Snowden. What a combination. Two young men who have made indelible impacts on the world of data protection," wrote Stewart Room, a partner at PwC, the law firm that handled the case.

In 2013, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about the U.S. government's Prism program that allowed it to harvest private information directly from big tech companies such as Facebook.

Facebook has repeatedly denied being a "back door" for U.S. spies.

READ: Snowden says 'stay away from Facebook, Dropbox, Google'

Schrems took up the battle, filing 22 complaints against Facebook in Ireland, where the company has its European headquarters. He also set up a website, called europe-v-facebook.org, with the aim of ensuring that Europeans' privacy rights are enforced against "tech giants like Facebook."

Afterwards, he lodged a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, asking it to stop Facebook's transfers of European users' data to its U.S. servers because of the risk of U.S. government snooping.

That complaint was thrown out as "frivolous and vexatious", but still, Schrems appealed. His case eventually wound its way to the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, which on Tuesday struck down the framework underpinning the data transfers of thousands of companies.

"Individuals now have far greater ability to exert a disruptive influence and shape law," said Paula Barrett, partner at law firm Eversheds.

Snowden, without whom Schrems said Tuesday's victory would have been impossible, congratulated the Austrian privacy activist via Twitter.

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