Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been ordered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to restrict the use of personal data for the purpose of targeted advertising.
The CJEU has completely supported a case filed against Meta regarding its Facebook service in C-446/21 (Schrems v. Meta).
Two questions were decided by the Court: First, severely restricting the usage of private information for internet marketing. Second, use publicly accessible personal data only for the purposes for which it was originally meant to be published.
This ruling was made in response to a case launched by privacy advocate Max Schrems, who claimed that Facebook exploited his data, including his sexual orientation, to show him personalised adverts.
Schrems initially filed his complaint in Austrian courts in 2020, alleging he was targeted with adverts for gay people despite never identifying his sexual orientation on the platform.
Newsng understands that through the use of third-party apps and other websites, Meta gathers digital information about Facebook users in order to personalise advertisements.
Under EU data protection law, information about a person’s sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, or health status is considered sensitive and subject to stringent processing regulations.
According to Meta, it doesn’t customise advertisements using so-called special category data.
“We await the publication of the Court’s judgment and will have more to share in due course,” Meta spokesman Matt Pollard told TechCrunch via email.
“Meta takes privacy very seriously and has invested over five billion Euros to embed privacy at the heart of all of our products. Everyone using Facebook has access to a wide range of settings and tools that allow people to manage how we use their information.”
We earlier reported that Meta has been fined €91 million ($101 million) for inadvertently keeping hundreds of millions of user passwords on its internal systems in plaintext rather than encrypted.
