Court of Justice of the European Union rules that Meta must minimise the amount of personal information for personalised advertising, in this case about sexual orientation
October 7, 2024 |
Max Shrems has struck again. He has been successful in his claim against Meta on the user of sexual orientation about a user’s sexual orientation in personalised advertising as reported by the BBC in Meta must limit data for personalised ads – EU court and by breaking news in Activist wins privacy case against Meta over personal data on sexual orientation.
Meta and other social media platforms use data to drive the effectiveness of personalised ads. That means the collection of data, especially personal information, is a priority. In practice sensitive information, such as sexual orientation, may assist in refining the nature of ads directed at a person.
The final judgment has not been published as yet.
The BBC article provides:
Facebook-owner Meta must minimise the amount of people’s data it uses for personalised advertising, the EU’s highest court says.
The Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) ruled in favour of privacy campaigner Max Schrems, who complained that Facebook misused his personal data about his sexual orientation to target ads at him.
In complaints first heard by Austrian courts in 2020, Mr Schrems said he was targeted with adverts aimed at gay people despite never sharing information about his sexuality on the platform.
The CJEU said on Friday that data protection law does not unequivocally allow the company to use such data for personalised adverting.
“An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data,” it said.
Data relating to someone’s sexual orientation, race or ethnicity or health status is classed as sensitive and carries strict requirements for processing under EU data protection law.
Meta says it does not use so-called special category data to personalise adverts.
“We await the publication of the Court’s judgment and will have more to share in due course,” said a Meta spokesperson responding to a summary of the judgement on Friday.
They said the company takes privacy “very seriously” and it has invested more than five billion Euros “to embed privacy at the heart of all of our products”.
Facebook users can also access a wide range of tools and settings to manage how their information is used, they added.
“We are very pleased by the ruling, even though this result was very much expected,” said Mr Schrems’ lawyer Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig.
“Following this ruling only a small part of Meta’s data pool will be allowed to be used for advertising – even when users consent to ads,” they added.
Dr Maria Tzanou, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC that Friday’s judgement showed data protection principles are not “toothless”.
“They do matter when big tech companies process personal data,” she added.
Will Richmond-Coggan, a partner at law firm Freeths, said the EU court’s decision will have “significant implications” despite not being binding for UK courts.
“Meta has suffered a serious challenge to its preferred business model of collecting, aggregating and leveraging substantial data troves in respect of as many individuals as possible, in order to produce rich insights and deep targeting of personalised advertising,” he said.
He added the company could face similar challenges in other jurisdictions based on the same concerns – noting Mr Schrems’ challenge was based on principles that exist in UK law.
Austria’s Supreme Court referred questions over how the GDPR applied to Mr Schrems’ complaint, answered on Friday, to the EU’s top court in 2021.
It asked whether Mr Schrems referring to his sexuality in a public setting meant he gave firms the green light to process this data for personalised advertising, by making it public.
The CJEU said that while it was for the Austrian court to decide if he had made the information “manifestly public data”, his public reference to his sexual orientation did not mean he authorised processing of any other personal data.
Mr Schrems’ legal team told the BBC that the Austrian Supreme Court is bound by the Court of Justice’s judgement.
They said they expect the Supreme Court’s final judgement in the coming weeks or months.
Mr Schrems has taken Meta to court several times over its approach to processing EU user data.
The Breaking News article provides:
The European Union’s top court has said social media company Meta cannot use public information about a user’s sexual orientation obtained outside its platforms for personalised advertising under the bloc’s strict data privacy rules.
The decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg is a victory for Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, who has been a thorn in the side of Big Tech companies over their compliance with the 27-nation bloc’s data privacy rules.
The EU court issued its ruling after Austria’s supreme court asked for guidance in Mr Schrems’ case on how to apply the privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The only time he had publicly revealed this fact was during a panel discussion.
“An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data,” the court said in a press release summarising its decision.
Even though Mr Schrems revealed he was gay in the panel discussion, that “does not authorise the operator of an online social network platform to process other data relating to his sexual orientation, obtained, as the case may be, outside that platform, with a view to aggregating and analysing those data, in order to offer him personalised advertising”.
Meta said it was awaiting publication of the court’s full judgment and that it “takes privacy very seriously”.
“Everyone using Facebook has access to a wide range of settings and tools that allow people to manage how we use their information,” the company said in a statement.
Mr Schrems’ lawyer Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig welcomed the court’s decision.
“Meta has basically been building a huge data pool on users for 20 years now, and it is growing every day. However, EU law requires ‘data minimisation’,” she said in a statement.
“Following this ruling only a small part of Meta’s data pool will be allowed to be used for advertising – even when users consent to ads.”
