24-year-old student started a war against Facebook

Max Schrems, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Vienna, has been leading an unequal battle with Facebook for several months now. It all started with the fact that Max sent several well-written requests and made sure that he was sent a CD-ROM from the California office with all personal data collected during three years of activity on the site.

Every citizen can request from Facebook for issuing to him within 40 days all the personal information collected on him. The site has a special form for such a request. You will receive a CD with a PDF file of several hundred megabytes and more than 1000 pages. Max Schrems received a PDF of more than 1200 pages, all the information in the file was divided into 57 categories (work, education, friends, political views, hobbies, photos, etc.). As Max says, even the KGB did not have such a complete dossier on citizens.
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But the most surprising thing is that, among other things, the sent file contained deleted messages, chat sessions, names of former friends and other data marked as deleted: true.

Facebook did not send all available information. In particular, the CD contains no data on the pages visited by the user on the Internet, on which the Like buttons are installed. It is known that Facebook cookies send information about the pages visited, even if the user did not click on this button. In response to another request, Max received a letter of strange content.

Dear Mr. Schrems!

Regarding the previous correspondence and your request of July 11, 2011 (Request).

As of today, we have disclosed to you all the personal information that you have the right to receive in accordance with section 4 of the Data Protection Act 1988 and 2003 (Laws).

Please note that some categories of personal data are not subject to requests. In accordance with section 4 (9) of the Acts, personal data are excluded from the action of requests, which cannot be collected or that can be collected only by making disproportionate efforts. We have not provided personal data that cannot be extracted from our platform by applying proportional efforts.

Section 4 (12) of the Acts describes exceptions to requests if the answer adversely affects the preservation of trade secrets or intellectual property. We have not provided you with information that is the intellectual property of Facebook Ireland Ltd or its licensors.

Please be sure that we have satisfied your request and will no longer process other similar requests until, in our opinion, enough time passes.

Thank you for contacting Facebook,
Facebook User Request Request Team

In order to deal with Facebook’s weird behavior, Max Schrems opened Europe vs. Facebook , as well as a video channel on Youtube .



The student launched a stormy activity on the Internet. For example, on the popular Reddit forum, its topic with instructions on how to get a CD from Facebook was among the ten most popular in a day.

In total, Max Schrems sent 22 requests to Facebook: separately for each item of questionable site functionality that could violate European law.

Now there is a noticeable activity around Facebook in Europe. More and more people order CDs with their personal information, and then share their experience on the forums. The problem is already being discussed in the media pages. It's funny that all this was possible only because Facebook opened the headquarters of Facebook Ireland Ltd in Dublin (Ireland) in 2009, probably for tax evasion. Now, since the company is officially registered in Europe, it falls under European data protection legislation, which is much tougher than in the United States.

The Irish Data Protection Committee has already launched an investigation into the “fake” data deletion on Facebook, which is an absolute violation of the law. According to unofficial information, next week an audit (search) will begin in the Irish office of Facebook, which will last four to five days.