Advocate General (AG) Athanasios Rantos of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Thursday issued an opinion, largely siding with an Austrian lawyer and privacy activist who sued Meta for misusing his personal data to send him targeted advertisements. Meta is the parent company of popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. 

Privacy lawyer Max Schrems sued Facebook and Meta in Austria in 2020 for misusing his personal data. He asked the court for a declaration and an injunction because he regularly received advertisements directed at homosexuals, even though he had not publicly referred to his homosexuality on the Facebook platform. He believed the targeted advertisements resulted from Facebook’s processing and analysis of his personal data, which are in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

The Supreme Court of Austria referred the case to the CJEU in 2021, seeking clarification with respect to, among others, whether the GDPR’s data minimization principle permits a data controller’s processing of personal data without restriction as to time or type of data. The court also sought clarification as to whether a data subject’s own statements regarding his or her sexual orientation made during a panel discussion allow a data controller’s processing of other data relating to that data subject’s sexual orientation for the purpose of personalized advertising.

In his opinion issued on Thursday, Rantos sided with the data subject on both questions. In particular, he found that the GDPR must be interpreted as “precluding the processing of personal data for the purposes of targeted advertising without restriction as to time or type of data.” Rantos found that a statement made by a person about his or her sexual orientation during a panel discussion “does not in itself permit the processing of those or other data concerning the sexual orientation of that person with a view to aggregating and analysing the data for the purposes of personalised advertising.”

The AG’s opinion is not binding, but CJEU judges regularly follow such legal advice.

Schrems’ legal team said on Thursday that they were very pleased by the AG’s opinion, even though it was much expected. “Just because some information is public, does not mean it can be used for any other purposes… If users lose all their rights to published information, it would have a huge chilling effect on free speech,” said one of Schrems’ lawyers.

According to Meta, the company has invested $5.5 billion since 2019 into its privacy program and proactively reduced the amount of user data that it collects and uses. The company claims to be committed to “working with experts, policymakers and regulators to strengthen our practices and design and improve our products responsibly.”