An attempt to bring a class action suit against Facebook for alleged privacy violations has reached the Austrian Supreme Court. This follows a decision by the Vienna Court of Appeals that the plaintiff, the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, could file his own claim in the local court, even though Facebook's international headquarters are in Ireland. However, the same court also ruled that similar claims by other Facebook users cannot be combined into a class action.

The Austrian Supreme Court is being asked by Facebook to dismiss the entire lawsuit, while Schrems hopes to be given permission to start a class action by combining his "model case" with those of others.

As Schrems says on his site: "It would not make a lot of sense for the court or the parties before it to file these claims as thousands of individual lawsuits—which we can still do if a ‘class action’ is not allowed. We therefore think that the ‘class action’ is not only legal but also the only reasonable way to deal with thousands of identical privacy violations by Facebook."

The Austrian Supreme Court could decide directly whether to allow the class action, or it might refer the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), because of the important issues involved. The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its judgement early next year, and will not require any hearings. Once the admissibility of a class action has been decided, the case will go to the Vienna Regional Court, which will then set a date for the first hearing on the matter.

The current action in Austria has been running in parallel with Schrems' other legal battle, which was against Facebook's use of the Safe Harbour framework. Schrems won that case in a dramatic fashion at the CJEU last month.

Meanwhile, Facebook has a separate but equally serious problem in Belgium, where it was ordered to stop tracking Internet users who do not have a Facebook account within 48 hours, or face fines of €250,000 per day. However, according to an interview in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, there is a legal procedure that Facebook can use to appeal against that ruling while stopping the clock on the fines. The fact that we have heard nothing more about the order suggests Facebook has taken this or a similar route to put things on hold.