Class action lawsuit against Home Depot for sharing customer personal info with Zuckerberg can go ahead
Company was providing email addresses harvested at checkout with Facebook's parent company Meta
You know how you are asked by Home Depot cashiers if you want a receipt via email? And when you buy blinds or a grill mat then you see ads for window coverings or barbecues on Facebook?
In this day and age, few will be surprised since our phones are listening to us anyway, but Home Depot was providing your personal data to Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, for precisely that purpose.
Now they are facing a class-action lawsuit over the practice.
A Justice certified the class action in a decision in BC Supreme Court in Vancouver last week (Jan. 8, 2025). The plaintiff, Lasse Hvitved, argued that the practice violates the privacy rights of the millions of other potential plaintiffs.
"The plaintiff alleges that Home Depot breached various privacy statutes, common law duties, contractual obligations and was unjustly enriched," according to the language in the decision.
"Home Depot opposes certification of the class action as there is neither sufficient merit to the allegations nor would a class proceeding be appropriate in any event."
The claim involves more than six million emails and corresponding data shared with Meta over a period of years. Justice Peter Edelmann stated in the written decision he was satisfied that a class action provides "significant advantages in judicial economy and efficiency" and is more feasible than the alternative: hundreds of thousands of individual claims.
"The value of the individual claims would also make the costs of litigation prohibitive as individual claimants would be unlikely to recover the actual cost," Justice Edelmann wrote.
For its part, Home Depot argued that different data was collected about different customers, all with different privacy expectations depending on their agreements with Home Depot and/or Meta.
"I frankly find Home Depot’s position somewhat perplexing," Justice Edelmann frankly concluded. "When assessing its marketing strategies and managing its business interests, Home Depot was clearly able to compile data related to several million individual email addresses and arrange to have Meta undertake sophisticated data analysis on its behalf."
But they can't do that to settle a class-action lawsuit? Justice Edelmann ain't buying what Home Depot tried to sell him.
Given the wide net bast by corporations to harvest the data of all of us, each of whom have a different (mostly limited) capacity to assert or protect our rights, a class action only makes sense, he decided. In fact, cases such as this are why class action legislation exists.
"Class action proceedings are a procedural mechanism that was devised precisely to allow large groups of individuals to assert their rights collectively," Justice Edelmann wrote.
As a result he ordered the class action be certified.
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Paul J. Henderson
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