Last week three judges of the Federal Court of Australia looked at Facebook and came away unimpressed.
In critical legal proceedings, the social network’s US parent company Meta had tried to claim that it was not actually carrying out business in the country - despite it being used by an estimated 70 per cent of Australians.
Australia may be a minor market for Facebook, but it has already been hit with regulation here.Credit:Shutterstock
Facebook made the claim in an attempt to argue it couldn’t even be served with legal documents from Australia for alleged privacy breaches from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a shadowy political consultancy harvested Facebook data on millions of users to inform its strategies in 2014 and 2015.
According to the social media giant, its US-headquartered parent only conducted data processing services for Facebook Ireland Limited, which collects data from Australian citizens.
Which is all very convenient for Facebook, but not so much for the Australian Information Commissioner. The federal agency had brought the case alleging that 311,127 Australians had their personal data improperly disclosed in the saga, only to be met with Facebook’s legal stonewall.
While their decision was only preliminary, allowing the case to proceed further, Justices Nye Perram, David Yates and Chief Justice James Allsop, took issue with Facebook’s reasoning. Some of the company’s claims, Justice Perram wrote, were “divorced from reality”.
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“The business is not about the simple sale of goods whether tangible or intangible,” Allsop wrote. “It is about extracting value from information about people.”
It’s not just Facebook. Transportation company Uber and games powerhouse Valve, known for titles like Half-Life and the digital game store Steam, have both claimed in recent years that their entities weren’t operating in Australia when they faced legal trouble.