British Columbia Supreme Court judge rules class action can proceed alleging Home deposit violated the privacy of its customers when collecting and sharing their information after emailing purchase receipts.
The suit alleges that Home Depot collected information when British Columbia customers opted for emailed receipts, including the purchase price, brands purchased and data linked to the customer’s email address, then shared them without consent with tech giant Meta.
Judge Peter Edelmann allowed the class to be certified for the alleged privacy violations in a ruling posted online Wednesday, but he rejected claims that Home Depot violated other duties and contractual obligations.
The certification is not a finding of wrongdoing, and Home Depot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The ruling says Meta, which operates Facebook, offered a service to help the company understand whether its advertising campaigns on the social media platform were leading to in-store sales.
The court document states that Home Depot argued that customers had no reasonable expectation of privacy because the information shared with Meta was “high-level” and less sensitive, but Edelmann disagreed, saying that privacy expectations “cannot be assessed piecemeal.”
The ruling says the claim involves more than six million emails and corresponding data shared with Meta over several years. The judge said the alternative to a class action would be hundreds of thousands of individual claims “that are simply not feasible.”
“The value of individual claims would also make litigation costs prohibitive, as individual claimants are unlikely to recover the actual cost,” he said.
“The argument, as I understand it, is that Home Depot customers reasonably expected that their purchase data would not be compiled and shared with Meta to be used not only to generate marketing information for Home Depot , but also for Meta’s own marketing purposes including user profiling and targeted advertising unrelated to Home Depot.
The decision indicates that other class actions making similar allegations have also been launched in Quebec and Saskatchewan.
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