Australia sues Facebook over user data, echoing US antitrust case

Byron Kaye

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s regulator sued Facebook Inc on Wednesday, accusing it of collecting user data without permission based on efforts by governments around the world to clamp down on the social network.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said it was seeking an unspecified fine from Facebook for promoting a virtual private network as a way to protect its data while secretly using the information to select targets for commercial takeovers.

The lawsuit follows a landmark action by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that accused the social media giant of improperly maintaining market dominance by using customer data to decide acquisition targets, including messaging app Whatsapp and photo-sharing app Instagram.

“There is a link to what the FTC is saying, but it is looking at a competition issue,” ACCC president Rod Sims said at a televised news conference. “We look at the consumer.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the company “has always been clear about what information we collect and how we use it.”

“We will review the recent submission by the ACCC and will continue to defend our position in response to this latest submission,” she added.

Facebook disabled its VPN product in 2019.

Earlier this month, Australia moved forward with plans, in line with Sims’s recommendation, for Facebook and internet giant Google to pay national media for content that appeared on their websites.

Australia’s privacy regulator has filed a separate lawsuit against Facebook, accusing it of violating user privacy with a personality test conducted by political marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook defends this action. The ACCC is also suing Google, claiming it misled users about its data collection.

Unlike the U.S. lawsuit, which could force Facebook to sell assets, the Australian lawsuit could force the company to change the way it informs users about its activities, said Rob Nicholls, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales who specializes in competition law.

“Rather than taking an antitrust approach that ‘the only way to solve this problem is to break it up’, it is more ‘we will take all the steps we can under applicable law to change behavior so that it is acceptable to Australian consumers and Australian businesses,’” Nicholls said .

(Additional reporting by Nikhil Kurian Nainan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Stephen Coates)