Max Schrems, jurist: The promise of the cloud was that everything would be much cheaper, but it turns out that it functions as a monopoly'

"Few individuals have influenced European legislation as much as 37-year-old Max Schrems. At the age of 23, when he returned home to his native Austria after studying a semester of law at Santa Clara University in California, he filed 22 complaints against Facebook after analyzing the 1,200 pages of information that the company had on him: he detected several potential violations of his privacy."

"At 26, the Vienna-born activist initiated another lawsuit against Facebook, this time for sending his personal data to the U.S., where privacy regulations are more lax than in the EU. In 2015, the courts ruled in his favor. And, since then, the personal information of European citizens can only be transferred to countries that guarantee comparable data processing. In 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the US-EU data transfer regime."

"The jurist has sued Apple and Google for tracking cell phones which run their respective companies' operating systems without users' permission. He has also sued Microsoft for misusing minors' data with its 365 Education package. He has taken on X (formerly Twitter) for training its artificial intelligence (AI) tool with user data without informing them. He doesn't back down from the big tech companies, which are fully aware of the organization through which Schrems carries out his activism: NOYB"

Max Schrems used litigation to reshape European data protection and to confront large technology companies over privacy practices. He filed 22 complaints against Facebook after reviewing 1,200 pages of his personal data and later sued Facebook over transfers of European data to the United States. Courts ruled in his favor in 2015, limiting transfers to countries with comparable protections, and the CJEU struck down the US-EU data transfer regime in 2020. Schrems has sued Apple and Google for phone tracking, Microsoft for mishandling minors' data, and X for training AI with user data, pursuing these cases through NOYB.

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