Facebook, now known as Meta, faces a fine of over $3.2 billion over allegations that it exploited data and abused its market dominance, Reuters reported Friday (Jan. 14).
A senior adviser to the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority, Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, said she was bringing the class action case on behalf of Facebook users in Britain that used the platform between 2015 and 2019.
Per the report, Facebook allegedly earned billions of pounds through its unfair terms and conditions, which made users give up valuable personal data to access the popular social media network.
In response to the lawsuit, Facebook said that those who used its services did so because it was valuable for them, and “they have meaningful control of what information they share on Meta’s platforms and who with.”
Gormsen said there was a “dark side” to Facebook in that it reportedly abused its market dominance and put these unfair terms and conditions on users by collecting data through things like Facebook Pixel. This reportedly allowed it to build an “all-seeing picture” of internet usage, generating detailed profiles of users.
Facebook has also been fighting an antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. PYMNTS reported that the FTC lawsuit will be allowed to continue with its allegations of monopolization, rejecting Facebook’s dismissal requests.
See also: Facebook Can’t Fence Off FTC Antitrust Suit, But It Narrows Scope
The FTC’s goal is to make Facebook unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which could be seen as attempts to monopolize the market. The original FTC lawsuit was dismissed by the judge a year earlier for not establishing enough grounds for punishment.
The judge said there was now more evidence that Facebook “not only possesses monopoly power, but that it has willfully maintained that power through anti-competitive conduct — specifically, the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.”
That said, the judge did reject allegations around the platform policies, narrowing the scope of the lawsuit and noting that the FTC might not be able to prove all of its allegations.
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