A woman is suing Facebook for bombarding her with hundreds of baby content adverts after she became a mother. When she attempted to put a stop to the ads in her settings, she found that she couldn’t.
According to The Times:
Tanya O’Carroll, 35, a campaigner on technology and human rights, is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook, because it will not let her opt out of the user profiling it uses to sell adverts.
O’Carroll was “bombarded” with baby content after becoming a mother in 2017. When she tried to turn such adverts off using Facebook’s settings, it did not work.
After digging further, she discovered that Facebook had tagged her with more than 700 characteristics based on her activity.
It inferred what films she watched, where she wanted to go on holiday, her shopping habits, the clothes she liked, her political sensibilities and health, relationship and family matters. Some of the subjects should not have been there or were incorrect.
“Homosexuality was one of them. The name of a UK political party was one of them. Feminism was one of them. These are things that are actually just considered sensitive, protected characteristics, things that could reveal things about you that really an advertiser should not be seeing,” she said.
Although Meta is changing its policies to exclude protected characteristics, O’Carroll is suing because she believes users should be able to opt out.
She is relying on GDPR legislation that gives the right to object to personal data being used for direct marketing.
Meta argues that this law does not apply and that O’Carroll has agreed to the targeting in the terms and conditions of the service.
Her lawyers say that the opt-out is inviolable.
O’Carroll said she did not object to being advertised to, just its invasive nature.
She is not seeking damages, but a yes/no choice. She said:
“What I really want in this case with the right to object is just choice.”
When asked why she did not leave Facebook, O’Carroll said: “I’ve lived my entire adult life on Facebook.
It’s a repository of connections and relationships I’ve made in other parts of the world, of my family that I don’t have in the UK. It is just not something that people feel that they can leave and even if they wanted to, where do they go? Because it’s a monopoly.”
