A lawsuit filed in the High Court of England and Wales has demanded that Meta's Facebook social media platform stops harvesting personal data for the purposes of advertising and marketing.
The suit was filed by tech and human rights activist Tanya O'Carroll, who said this amounts to "surveillance advertising" with her legal team claiming: "Meta repeatedly refused to respect ... O'Carroll's absolute right to object to being surveilled and profiled" when she tried to opt out of having her personal data being processed by Meta for the purposes of marketing.
At the core of O'Carroll's complaint are allegations that Meta is breaking data protection law – the UK GDPR – by doing so, with her legal reps at AWO saying that internet users have had the "right to object" since the GDPR was adopted in the UK in 2018 (see below). O'Carroll is a senior fellow at Foxglove, the same legal campaign group protesting the
government's extraction of UK hospital datasets to the systems of US tech company Palantir without the patients' consent.
The particulars of claim [
PDF] also detail what the suit characterizes as a "significant asymmetry of information between the Claimant and Meta" regarding the "types of personal data which Meta collects" and "the processing activities which Meta undertakes on those personal data for the purpose of selecting and delivering Direct Marketing Material to users of Facebook."
Solicitor Ravi Naik, legal director at data rights agency AWO, said: "Meta is straining to concoct legal arguments to deny our client even has this right. But Tanya's claim is straightforward; it will hopefully breathe life back into the rights we are all guaranteed under the GDPR."
www.theregister.com
