The British Columbia Supreme Court has allowed a class-action complaint against Home Depot charging that it has contravened privacy laws by revealing 7 million customer emails to Meta to gauge the effectiveness of advertisements.
The instances happened between 2018 and 2022 and were done without authorization from the consumers.
The lawsuit has been brought by Merchant Law Group and it seeks to get compensation for the affected consumers and also draw attention to wider concerns about managing consumer data. The lawsuit if successful will also set a benchmark for any future breach in consumer privacy.
Class Action Lawsuit Against Home Depot Over Privacy Breach Allegations
According to the lawsuit, Home Depot collected consumer emails in the guise of providing electronic receipts. However, the business gave Meta, the parent company of Facebook access to these email data to test the effectiveness of Facebook ads.
The lawsuit alleges that the company had contravened their contractual duties and privacy laws. Home Depot had provided more than 7 million emails of consumers to Meta between 2018 and 2022. Meta’s analytical tools which checked the effectiveness of the advertisements used the emails to check in-store transactions which were influenced by advertisements which were linked to Facebook profiles. Meta sought to calculate the offline buying habits of consumers influenced by online advertising.
HomeDepot on its part contended that when the analysis was concluded Meta would remove the hashed email data from its systems. However, investigations by the Ontario Privacy Commissioner (OPC) in 2021 revealed that no user authorization was obtained before sharing this data. The practice was stopped by Home Depot in 2022 after directions from the Ontario Privacy Commissioner (OPC).
Home Depot also argued that consumers did not have any expectations of privacy because the information shared with Meta was trivial and less sensitive. However, the lawsuit stated that privacy expectations “cannot be assessed on a piecemeal basis.
The lawsuit sponsored by Merchant Law Group seeks compensation for consumers whose emails were given to Meta from 2018 to 2022. All the impacted clients in Canada are eligible to become a part of the case.
Class law actions are usually filed when a large number of people have been the subject of some illegal act which is one of the best ways to address the grievance instead of going for individual litigation.
The lawsuit was allowed by Justice Peter Edelmann on Tuesday for the alleged breach of privacy.
Edelmann’s decision reads,
“I frankly find Home Depot’s position somewhat perplexing.When assessing its marketing strategies and managing its business interests, Home Depot was clearly able to compile data related to several million individual email addresses and arrange to have Meta undertake sophisticated data analysis on its behalf. However, when it comes to assessing the impact for the individuals concerned, it is presumably impossible to do so using even the most rudimentary tools of data analysis.”
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