(CN) — A prominent Austrian lawyer and privacy activist on Thursday won a key round in his European Union court fight to restrict the use of personal data by Facebook and other digital advertising platforms.
Max Schrems accuses Facebook of violating strict EU privacy rules by using off-limits personal data to send him targeted advertisements.
On Thursday, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos, a legal adviser to the European Court of Justice, the EU's top court, issued an opinion that largely sided with Schrems. The opinions of advocates general are non-binding on the Luxembourg-based court, but their legal advice is mostly followed by the court's judges.
The case focuses on ensuring online platforms abide by EU rules that say the use of someone's data for advertising must be limited in time, type and source — what the rules define as “data minimization.”
Schrems says he regularly received advertisements directed at homosexuals, a pattern he believes was based on Facebook's analysis of his interests because he had not publicly referred to being homosexual on the platform.
He says Facebook uses all the data it has ever collected on a person for advertising — and that, Schrems argues, runs foul of the EU's 2018 General Data Protection Regulation.
In 2020, he sued Facebook and Meta, the parent company, in Austrian courts. The Austrian Supreme Court has asked the top EU court for an interpretation of EU data rules. Specifically, the Austrian judges were uncertain whether Facebook has the right to process all personal data available to it without restriction to time for its targeted advertising.
Rantos said personal data cannot be processed “without restriction as to time,” though he left it up to the Austrian courts to determine how far back data can be used.
Another question before Rantos involved an event where Schrems referred to his homosexuality during a public panel discussion. Rantos said his public disclosure about his sexual orientation did not mean this information could be used “for the purposes of personalized advertising.”
“We are very pleased by the opinion, even though this result was very much expected,” Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig, a lawyer for Schrems, said in a statement.
“At the moment, the online advertising industry simply stores everything forever,” Raabe-Stuppnig said. “The law is clear that the processing must stop after a few days or weeks.”
“For Meta," she added, "this would mean that a large part of the information they have collected over the last decade would become taboo for advertising.”
Raabe-Stuppnig said EU data rules restrict the indefinite use of personal data for advertising even if users have consented to personalized ads.
She argued companies should not be allowed to use all the information they can scrape about someone, including comments they make on social media, for advertising.
“If you make a political comment on social media, it cannot be used for targeting political advertising at you,” she said. “If users lose all their rights to published information, it would have a huge chilling effect on free speech.”
Meta said it would wait for a final decision from the top court but noted that since 2019 it has overhauled the way it processes personal data and spent 5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) "to embed privacy at the heart 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,” the company said in a statement.
Meta said it does not use sensitive data in its personalized advertising and prohibits advertisers from sharing sensitive information. The company added that it filters out "any potentially sensitive information that we’re able to detect" and has taken steps "to remove any advertiser targeting options based on topics perceived by users to be sensitive."
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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