EU court bars Meta from using sexual orientation to target ads

A European Union (EU) court has ruled that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, cannot target users in the EU with ads based on public statements they’ve made about their sexual orientation.

Gay Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought the suit against the social media giant after nearly a decade of receiving ads that he believed targeted him due to his sexual orientation, arguing the company violated the EU’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which regulates how one’s personal data can be used.

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Schrems posited that company data shows it can figure out users’ sexualities from their online behavior even when they don’t declare it on their profiles. He said Meta then tailor ads based on this information, a practice the company has denied doing, according to Wired.

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The case was brought to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after a lower Austrian court ruled that Meta had a right to target Schrems based on his sexuality since he spoke about it at a public event.

CJEU ruled in opposition to the Austrian court.

“The fact that Mr. Maximilian Schrems has made a statement about his sexual orientation on the occasion of a public panel discussion does not authorize the operator of an online social network platform to process other data relating to his sexual orientation, obtained, as the case may be, outside that platform, with a view to aggregating and analyzing those data, in order to offer him personalized advertising,” the ruling stated.

Schrems acknowledged that the question of whether folks on a “public stage” can be targeted through data does not apply to that many people.

“It’s a really, really niche problem,” he told Wired.

But the court also ruled that personal data cannot be “aggregated, analyzed, and processed for the purposes of targeted advertising without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data.”

Matt Pollard, a spokesperson for Meta said the company will review the entire ruling when fully published.

“Meta takes privacy very seriously and has invested over 5 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,” Pollard said.

In a statement, Shrems’ lawyer Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig, explained, “Meta has basically been building a huge data pool on users for 20 years now, and it is growing every day. However, EU law requires ‘data minimization.’ Following this ruling, only a small part of Meta’s data pool will be allowed to be used for advertising — even when users consent to ads.”

Schrems called his privacy issue with Meta “just another one in the long list of violations they have.”

“The walls are closing in,” he said.

The company has certainly found itself in hot water with LGBTQ+ users before. A report released earlier this year from LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD found that Meta has failed to enforce its policies against anti-transgender hate posts, including posts made by high-profile political influencers and media outlets.

Additionally, some LGBTQ+ content creators on Meta have accused the company of limiting their posts’ reach because of Meta’s new restrictions on political content, including content involving politicians and queer social issues.

“As the trillion-dollar company’s revenues soar, Meta continues to lay off critical trust and safety teams and increasingly relies on ineffective AI systems for content moderation,” GLAAD wrote in its report. “Meta’s enforcement failures have prompted repeated rebukes and concern from the Oversight Board (the independent body that makes non-binding but precedent-setting content moderation rulings on Meta’s platforms). As Axios and The Verge have documented, some users find that their reports on harmful content are not reviewed at all.”

In 2023, a report from Media Matters for America found that Meta allowed anti-LGBTQ+ group Gays Against Groomers to spread hate speech and misinformation about LGBTQ+ people on its platforms in violation of the company’s policies for over a year.

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