Meta is facing a lawsuit for £3 billion as monetary compensation for user data on behalf of 45 million Facebook users in the UK.

The lawsuit alleges that Facebook used its market dominance to co-erce users to forfeit their personal data to the company without seeing any monetary gains, while Facebook was able to sell their data for personalised advertising to amass billions.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the EU recently found Facebook guilty of a similar offence in their recent GDPR ruling.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all found to be GDPR non-compliant for gaining ‘forced consent’ from users to access and use their personal data.

Meta was able to gain user ‘consent’ to track and store their personal data for advertising purposes by putting it in their terms and conditions. Essentially, this means users cannot access the service without giving up their data to advertising companies.

While the EU found this to be in breach of their data privacy legislation, the UK is still formulating their data protection regulations.

The current lawsuit was  formed in 2022 and is spearheaded by international competition lawyer Dr. Liza Lovdhal Gormsen.

While the EU case had more to do with legality, the UK case is making a monetary argument, stating that the Meta set an ‘unfair price’ to their users to access the service.

Users paid for the service with their data, and were only compensated with access to the free Facebook service, while Meta profited off of their user’s data through advertisement revenue.

In the first hearing, Meta argued the case should be thrown out – which they also argued for all three GDPR cases.

Meta’s lawyers argued that the case did not recognise the ‘economic value’ Facebook provided to consumers.

The case is yet to be certified by the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will have to certify that the collective cases can be tried together.

This is not the first case against Meta in the UK.

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Last year, a high court case was progressing in which the claimant said Meta had continued to store and use her data for personalised advertising after she opted out of the service.

Meta has also been targeted internationally for its monopolistic tendancies and industry dominance which governments have claimed to be anti-competition.

Currently, the US is reviewing Meta’s practices for this.

Further, the EU-wide data protection commission has called in the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) to further investigate Meta for sharing data between it’s three main platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – as well as its other data sharing practices. The Irish DPC has so far refused to investigate the company any further.

In the Uk, the case may have further backing as the Consumer Market Authority (CMA) declared Meta a monopoly in 2020, even saying that the company’s platforms were a ‘must-have mechanism’ for consumers to stay connected.

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