Crowd funding for legal action against Facebook

Since Kickstarter became the latest vogue way to get your business off of the ground, we've seen everything under the sun appear on crowd funding sites: books, movies, games, wargaming models and more. However one thing we haven't seen much of is legal funding, for taking on Facebook.

This is where a group of Austrian law students, founders of Europe vs Facebook come in. They believed that the social networks privacy practices are completely inadequate and want to take Facebook to court in the home country of its HQ, Ireland. In order to do so, it plans to use the site crowd4privacy.org to help raise the required funds. As part of the money drive, the group is hoping to raise between 100,000 and 300,000 euros (approx. £80,000 – £240,000).

One of the group's claims is that the privacy policy on Facebook is far too complicated. “It is basically a collection of American legalese, which is intentionally vague and gives the company adequate leeway to do basically anything they want with your data,” said group member Max Schrems.

While it might seem like even with a few hundred thousand euros, it will be difficult for the group to go up against the billion dollar corporation, it has managed to get the social network to make changes in the past. According to the NYTimes, back in 2010, 22 complains from Mr Schrem and colleagues were implemented. However, Schrems said that this amounts to “only about 10 per cent of what we had asked them to do.”

KitGuru Says: Well guys, you've kicked in for Star Citizen and Project Infinity, what about this one?

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