It all started when Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, met members of Facebook’s privacy team during his exchange semester at Santa Clara University, California. After being stunned at their “reinterpretation” of European data-protection legislation, he wrote a paper on the issue. To do so he asked some friends in Austria to make an access request at Facebook Ireland, the contractor for all Facebook users outside of US and Canada. After receiving three data sets with up to 1,222 pages of data, it was clear that this ought to be published online. Later it was discovered that the data sets also included massive amounts of “deleted” data. The group of students again asked themselves why no one was doing anything about this. So they decided simply to transform the law-school paper into 22 complaints filed with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), who is responsible for Facebook’s operations. At the same time they published a simple explanation of how users could access their data, which soon became viral on the Internet and was linked to by the mass media and copied by blogs all around the world. According to Facebook, by December 2011, 40,000 users had made such a request. The Irish DPC published a first report in December 2011, demanding massive changes by Facebook Ireland. According to Facebook representatives these are among the most far-reaching changes on the privacy front that the company has ever had to undertake.

We are currently working on our goal to get a formal decision that will hopefully be much further reaching than this first report. At the same time the mass media as well as politics has picked up on the project. This enabled us to explain all around the world what data Facebook is gathering and how it uses it. Even Viviane Reding, (EU Justice Commissioner) quoted our case when presenting the new European proposal for stricter data-protection legislation.

Links: www.europe-v-facebook.org

**Europe versus Facebook** is more or less a scattered group of about ten students with one person (Max Schrems) taking the leading role. All complaints are in his name, since he is the group’s only expert on data protection. He is supported by other members who help with press releases, corrections, the web page or by answering e-mails. The group is considering becoming a non-profit organization, especially as it will soon need to manage external funding (so far the only cost is a server). At the same time the complaints and legal action will ultimately have to go through an individual, which is currently Max Schrems.