The Austrian Lawyer Who Took On Facebook

Attorney Max Schrems got interested in the privacy issue while attending college as an exchange student at Santa Clara University. When some Silicon Valley executives spoke to his class on privacy law, it rankled him to hear how condescending they were, denigrating European laws “without realizing there was a European in the room,” he told Bloomberg News, As part of his classroom work, Schrems did some research and made a discovery that alarmed him: When you delete information from a Facebook account, although it’s no longer on your site it’s not really deleted. Facebook still has it. His work became the basis for several lawsuits, one of which eventually got to the EU Court of Justice and helped spur the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the “Privacy Shield.” Schrems is now planning further legal actions, and not just against Facebook.