An Australian regulator on Wednesday sued Facebook, accusing the social media giant of collecting user data of Australians without permission.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said the Onavo Protect mobile application, which Facebook ended in 2019, told customers it would store their data private. However, ACCC claimed that the tech giant utilized the data for research.

ACCC accused Onavo Protect, which allowed customers to use a virtual private network (VPN) service, of misleading consumers in Australia between February 2016 and October 2017.

“Consumers often use VPN services because they care about their online privacy, and that is what this Facebook product claimed to offer. In fact, Onavo Protect channeled significant volumes of their personal activity data straight back to Facebook,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said in a statement.

However, instead of keeping user activity data confidential, ACCC said Onavo Protect "collected, aggregated and used significant amounts of users' personal activity data for Facebook's commercial benefit.”

Sims added that they “believe that the conduct deprived Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their personal activity data by Facebook and Onavo.”

Legal cases mount vs. tech giants

Australian officials have already put pressure on digital tech giants including Facebook and Google through draft legislation that they should pay for content from news outlets that they share.

Australia's information commissioner started to file legal cases against Facebook last March for allegedly exposing citizens to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm.

On December 9, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general for 46 U.S. states and a coalition of the attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, filed lawsuits against Facebook, accusing it of maintaining a monopoly.

The Commission and the multistate coalition led by New York Attorney General Letitia James worked together in the years-long investigation into Facebook to determine whether it engaged in anticompetitive business practices.

Based on the results of the probe, the FTC and the multistate coalition determined that the social network giant violated antitrust laws.

The multistate coalition’s complaint also alleged that Facebook engaged in predatory practices to maintain its monopoly.

The social network giant allegedly “illegally acquired competitors and cut services to smaller threats. As a result, it lessened users from the benefits of competition and privacy protections.

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