Advocate Basic (AG) Athanasios Rantos of the Court docket of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Thursday issued an opinion, largely siding with an Austrian lawyer and privateness activist who sued Meta for misusing his private knowledge to ship him focused ads. Meta is the father or mother firm of common social media platforms like Fb and Instagram.
Privateness lawyer Max Schrems sued Fb and Meta in Austria in 2020 for misusing his private knowledge. He requested the court docket for a declaration and an injunction as a result of he commonly acquired ads directed at homosexuals, although he had not publicly referred to his homosexuality on the Fb platform. He believed the focused ads resulted from Fb’s processing and evaluation of his private knowledge, that are in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The Supreme Court docket of Austria referred the case to the CJEU in 2021, looking for clarification with respect to, amongst others, whether or not the GDPR’s data minimization principle permits a knowledge controller’s processing of non-public knowledge with out restriction as to time or kind of knowledge. The court docket additionally sought clarification as as to whether a knowledge topic’s personal statements relating to his or her sexual orientation made throughout a panel dialogue enable a knowledge controller’s processing of different knowledge referring to that knowledge topic’s sexual orientation for the aim of customized promoting.
In his opinion issued on Thursday, Rantos sided with the info topic on each questions. Particularly, he discovered that the GDPR have to be interpreted as “precluding the processing of non-public knowledge for the needs of focused promoting with out restriction as to time or kind of knowledge.” Rantos discovered {that a} assertion made by an individual about his or her sexual orientation throughout a panel dialogue “doesn’t in itself allow the processing of these or different knowledge in regards to the sexual orientation of that individual with a view to aggregating and analysing the info for the needs of personalised promoting.”
The AG’s opinion is just not binding, however CJEU judges commonly comply with such authorized recommendation.
Schrems’ authorized workforce said on Thursday that they had been very happy by the AG’s opinion, although it was a lot anticipated. “Simply because some data is public, doesn’t imply it may be used for some other functions… If customers lose all their rights to printed data, it will have an enormous chilling impact on free speech,” mentioned certainly one of Schrems’ legal professionals.
In line with Meta, the corporate has invested $5.5 billion since 2019 into its privateness program and proactively decreased the quantity of person knowledge that it collects and makes use of. The corporate claims to be dedicated to “working with consultants, policymakers and regulators to strengthen our practices and design and enhance our merchandise responsibly.”
