Sydney, Australia:
Australia’s customer watchdog launched legal action against Facebook on Wednesday, alleging the social media giant “misled” thousands of Australians by collecting user information from a cost-free VPN service advertised as private.
The platform could face a fine if discovered guilty of deceiving customers, as Australia requires an increasingly assertive stance towards strong US tech titans.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has accused Facebook and two of its subsidiaries — Facebook Israel and Onavo Inc — of misleading individuals who downloaded its virtual private network (VPN) app Onavo Protect, by collecting and working with their “very detailed and valuable personal activity data”.
Records of which apps they accessed and the quantity of time they spent working with them had been amongst the information allegedly applied to help Facebook’s marketplace investigation.
The ACCC alleges Facebook and its two partners falsely represented the now-defunct VPN service as maintaining user information “private, protected and secret” involving February 2016 and October 2017.
“Consumers often use VPN services because they care about their online privacy, and that is what this Facebook product claimed to offer. In fact, Onavo Protect channelled significant volumes of their personal activity data straight back to Facebook,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims mentioned.
“We believe that the conduct deprived Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their personal activity data by Facebook and Onavo.”
A Facebook spokesperson mentioned the firm had cooperated with the ACCC’s investigation and would overview the court filing.
“When people downloaded Onavo Protect, we were always clear about the information we collect and how it is used,” they mentioned.
“We will… continue to defend our position in response to this recent filing.”
The ACCC has previously helped draft a law that threatens Facebook and Google with millions of dollars in fines unless they agree to spend media outlets when their platforms host news content.
In March, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner also started legal action against Facebook for allegedly exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a information breach by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook has currently paid penalties in the United States and Britain more than the enormous 2018 information hijacking scandal involving the now-defunct British enterprise.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)