UK LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST META OVER DATA COLLECTION FOR TARGETED ADS

Tue 22 November 2022:

A complaint filed in the United Kingdom against Meta, the parent company of the social media platform, accuses the internet giant of gathering user personal information for the purpose of producing targeted A complaint filed in the United Kingdom against Meta, the parent company of the social media platform, accuses the internet giant of gathering user personal information for the purpose of producing targeted adverts.

Tanya O’Carroll, a human rights activist, said in the case that Meta had broken UK data rules by turning down her prior request for the use of her data. She reportedly asked the company to stop obtaining her data when she uses the application, according to The Guardian.

“This case is really about us all being able to connect with social media on our own terms, and without having to essentially accept that we should be subjected to hugely invasive tracking surveillance profiling just to be able to access social media,” O’Carroll told BBC in a radio interview.

“With this case, I’m really using this right that’s long been there on the law books, but has been up until now not been exercised, which is to simply say ‘I object’, and if we are successful in that then everybody will have that right,” she added when asked about the details of the lawsuit against Meta.

According to 21 (2) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), any UK citizen is entitled to protest against the processing of his/her data for advertising purposes. O’Carroll, who is a part of the UK legal campaign group Foxglove, accused Meta of violating the provision and said that a win in the lawsuit will serve as a precedent for a number of such cases filed all around the world.

“We know that privacy is important to our users and we take this seriously. That’s why we build tools like privacy check-up and ads preferences, where we explain what data people have shared and show how they can exercise control over the type of ads they see,” Meta said in an official statement.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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