GER: No Compensation for Facebook Scraping Victims

Oct 20, 2023 Benn-Ibler Rechtsanwälte

Following the so-called Facebook scraping cases, there will be no compensation for Facebook users under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). According to the Higher Regional Court of Hamm, Germany (hereinafter OLG), although there was a breach of data protection regulations, the plaintiff was unable to sufficiently prove her non-material damage.

In 2021, unknown individuals published data such as phone numbers and names of around 500 million Facebook users on the darknet. The unknown persons had collected the data through a process known as scraping. The data was obtained through search functions that the defendant Meta had made available to registered users at the time. The search function was available to all users even if the mobile phone number added to a user’s profile was set to ‘non-public’ and therefore not visible to other users.

The scrapers took advantage of this search function. Using common phone number formats, they generated millions of phone numbers. When a phone number was then associated with a matching user, the user’s public user information was associated and retrieved. The defendant company disabled this feature in 2018 after becoming aware of the scraping.

As a result of the data leak, many users filed lawsuits against Meta. The user in the present case was one of them. She claimed compensation from the platform operator for the material damage she had suffered. However, an appeal to the OLG was unsuccessful.

That there was a breach of the GDPR is beyond doubt. This is because it should have been Meta’s responsibility, as the data controller, to prove that the processing of the claimant’s data was lawful. However, Meta failed to do so. In addition, Meta had failed to take adequate measures to prevent further unauthorised access to the data, despite being aware of the data leak, which constituted a breach of duty requiring compensation. However, according to the OLG, the claim for damages failed due to a lack of specific non-material damage. The plaintiff was unable to prove this during the trial.

OLG Hamm 7 U 19/23 (15 August 2023)