A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can go ahead alleging Home Depot violated its customers' privacy when collecting and sharing their information after emailing purchase receipts.
The lawsuit alleges Home Depot gathered information when B.C. customers opted for emailed receipts, including the purchase price, brands bought, and data related to the customer's email address, then shared it without consent with technology giant Meta.
Justice Peter Edelmann allowed the certification of the class for the alleged breaches of privacy in a decision posted online Wednesday, but he dismissed claims that Home Depot violated other duties and contractual obligations.
The certification is not a finding of wrong-doing, and Home Depot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision says Meta, which operates Facebook, offered a service to help the company understand if its advertising campaigns on the social media platform were leading to in-store sales.
The court document says Home Depot argued 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 on a piecemeal basis."
The decision 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 lawsuit would be hundreds of thousands of individual claims "which are simply not feasible."
"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," he said.
"The pleading, as I understand it, is that Home Depot’s customers had a reasonable expectation 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 says other class-action proceedings making similar allegations have also been launched in Quebec and Saskatchewan.
