The parent company of social media platform – Meta – is currently facing a lawsuit in the United Kingdom accusing the tech giant of collecting personal data from users to create targeted advertisements. A human rights campaigner called Tanya O’Carroll has alleged in the lawsuit that Meta violated UK data laws by not agreeing to her prior request regarding using her data. According to The Guardian, she requested the company to stop collecting her data when she uses the application.
This case is really about us all being able to connect with social media on our terms, and without having to essentially accept that we should be subjected to hugely invasive tracking surveillance profiling just able to access social media, O’Carroll told BBC in a radio interview.
Meta’s surveillance-based enterprise standard is meeting an interesting legal challenge in the UK. from a person who’s suing over its continued processing of her data for ad targeting — despite her objection.
The legal challenge human rights campaigner Tanya O’Carroll — is seeking a declaration that Meta is in breach of the regional General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by resuming to process her data and use it to profile her for ad targeting purposes.
She says the goal of the litigation is to use a claim over her rights to set a precedent to enforce the right of millions of Meta users by denying the tech giant’s ability to track and profile people who object to its surveillance.
O’Carroll was the head coordinator of the People vs. Big Tech training and a former director and co-founder of Amnesty Tech. She’s now a senior partner at the law firm Foxglove.
Her lawsuit is not about seeking damages for privacy abuse — as is the case with another UK. legal challenge. It’s purely seeking to support (and thereby defend) personal requests.
On paper, the European Union’s GDPR (which the UK transposed into national law in 2018, locally updated as the Data Protection Act) delivers a suite of requests for people connected to their data including a right to object to processing for direct marketing purposes, an unqualified right no longer is processed for such a purpose if the user objects.
Thing is, Meta does not show users of its different social networking benefits an option to utilize its benefits without what it likes to refer to as personalized advertising.
We shouldn’t have to give up every piece of our private lives to join friends and family online. The law gives us the right to take back control over our data and stop Facebook surveilling and tracking us, said O’Carroll in a statement.
The AWO information requests tool is defining O’Carroll. Its legal director, Ravi Naik, told TechCrunch our client is objecting to processing her data for direct marketing purposes. That is an absolute right.
Naik again demonstrated the claimant is not pursuing damages or money. He said this is purely about the right to object, so non-monetary relief.
In a supportive statement, he added Meta is pushing to concoct legal opinions to deny actual client has this right. But Tanya’s claim is straightforward; it will hopefully breathe life back into the rights all guaranteed under the GDPR.
As well as a declaration Meta breaches the UK. GDPR’s right to object, the claimant is seeking to force it to stop processing her data for direct marketing — and stop related profiling of her, such as Meta removing assumptions around her to micro-target ads or posting ad interests, ad topics, or your topics for marketing purposes.
The claim document includes a (long) list ad interests Meta assigned to O’Carroll between 16 June 2021 and 14 October 2022 including several topics containing sensitive interests despite the change it announced a year ago Meta said it remove as targeting options topics that people may perceive as sensitive.
Per the claimant, Meta said these differences were completed by March 2022 — yet she found that a range of sensitive Ad Interests remained assigned to her as of October 14, 2022 — including issues connected to politics and philosophical viewpoints, relationships, and family matters; ancestry and identity; and psychological matters.
This is not the foremost moment a legitimacy of processing type criticism has been dropped at Meta’s tracking and targeting business model.
Indeed, the first GDPR complaints filed after the pan-EU framework began to apply back in May 2018 targeted what the complainant dubbed Facebook’s forced consent arguing that since users were not offered a free choice to deny it track then consent was not being legally obtained under the GDPR.
Thing is, Meta has aimed to avoid GDPR protests targeting its surveillance-based enterprise example by trading from an earlier claim to be getting user permission to rotate data to arguing users are even in a warranty with it to receive personalized ads.
