In 2022, Tanya O'Carroll, a British human rights campaigner, filed a lawsuit against Meta to demand that the company stop using her personal data to target ads at her on Facebook. The suit argued that Facebook ads qualify as direct marketing under the European General Data Protection Regulation, which meant O’Carroll had the right to request that Meta stop using her personal data for targeted advertising.
The case wound its way through British courts until this March, when O’Carroll and her lawyers announced a settlement. Meta agreed to stop using personal data to show her ads. "I've essentially been able to turn off all the creepy, invasive, targeted ads on Facebook,” O’Carroll told the BBC.
In a statement, Meta said: “We fundamentally disagree with the claims made by Ms O’Carroll, no business can be mandated to give away its services for free. We take our UK GDPR obligations seriously and provide robust settings and tools for users to control their data and advertising preferences.”
As a result of the settlement, anyone in a country covered by the GDPR can send an objection email to Meta and request that it stop targeting ads at their account(s).
But it wasn’t always clear how the case would turn out. The path to the settlement included a previously unreported investigative experiment that helped counter a key claim from Meta about its advertising system.
I spoke to Cameron Hickey, the CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship and a longtime social media investigator, about how he designed and executed a Facebook ads experiment that helped strengthen O’Carroll’s case.
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