BERLIN—Austria’s Supreme Court has questioned the legal basis on which Facebook collects user data and referred key issues for a ruling by Europe’s top court, after awarding symbolic damages to activist Max Schrems in his privacy case against the company. In a 34-page ruling, the Austrian court accepted the request from Schrems, who has waged a years-long campaign against what he views as Facebook’s intrusive privacy practices, to refer key questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The civil case revolves around Schrems’ assertion that Facebook deprives users of the rights and protections they enjoy under the EU’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by treating consent as a contract that empowers it to use their data to deliver targeted ads. “Facebook tries to strip users of many GDPR rights by simply ‘reinterpreting’ consent to be a civil law contract,” Schrems said in a statement …