Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times

Monday, February 06, 2012

Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook

By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

BERLIN — As Wall Street prepares for a record, multibillion-dollar initial stock sale from Facebook, the social networking site, a meeting with the potential to shape the economics of the deal was set to take place Monday in Vienna.

Richard Allan, a former member of Parliament in Britain who is the European director of policy for Facebook, and another executive from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, will meet with Max Schrems, a 24-year-old college student.

Mr. Schrems, a law student at the University of Vienna and a user of Facebook since 2008, has led a vocal campaign in Europe against what he maintains are Facebook’s illegal practices of collecting and marketing users’ personal data, often without consent.

In less than a year, Mr. Schrems’s one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them.

Mr. Schrems and his crusade have become a cause célèbre in parts of Europe, attracting the attention of lawmakers in Brussels as the Continent begins a lengthy debate over tough new proposed restrictions on personal data, which could affect Web businesses like Facebook.

Last month, the author of a proposed European data protection law, which would update a 1995 statute to reflect the realities of the digital age, cited Mr. Schrems’s case as an example of why European lawmakers should adopt tightened controls over Web businesses.

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EPA Reaches Settlement with Companies to Pay Cleanup Costs

News Release from EPA Region 3:

EPA reaches settlement with companies to pay cleanup costs for Occidental Chemical Corp. Superfund site

       PHILADELPHIA (January 25, 2012) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced that current and former owners and operators of the Occidental Chemical Corporation Superfund Site in Lower Pottsgrove Township, Montgomery County, Pa. have agreed to pay $2.1 million in past cleanup costs for the site.

In a consent decree filed in federal court by the Justice Department on behalf of EPA, the companies also assumed responsibility for all future cleanup costs at the site. The companies included Occidental Chemical Corporation (OxyChem), Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc.

Under the “Superfund” law, the landowners, waste generators and waste transporters that are responsible for the contamination of a Superfund site must either clean up the site, or reimburse the government or other parties for cleanup activities.

OxyChem currently owns the site where it manufactured polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic resins from 1980 to 2005. OxyChem purchased the site from Firestone Tire & Rubber Company(now known as Bridgestone Americas Tire operations), which manufactured tires and PVC there from approximately 1945 to 1980. Settling defendant Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., a corporate affiliate of OxyChem, is the current operator of the site.   Glenn Springs assumed management of the site in 2005 after OxyChem closed its PVC-manufacturing facility.

From 1942 to 1985, operators used the site for disposal of industrial wastes including cutting oils, metal filings, tires, and PVC sludge resins. In 1989, EPA placed the site on its Superfund list of the nation’s most contaminated sites to address unsafe levels of trichloroethylene (“TCE”), vinyl chloride, and other hazardous substances in the soil and groundwater. OxyChem, under EPA oversight, performed remedial action at the site and completed construction in 2008.

            Additional information on the site is available at: http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/super/sites/PAD980229298/index.htm .