Home Depot is now facing class action lawsuit over privacy issues in Canada

The BC Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a class action lawsuit accusing Home Depot of asking customers’ emails to send an electronic receipt and then giving the list of emails to a third party.

The third party in question was Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The customers alleged in their submissions that Home Depot gained unfair financial advantage by violating privacy rules and contractual obligations to people who visited the store.

It all started in 2018 when Home Depot asked customers to enter their email addresses to receive an electronic receipt for their purchase. In addition to emailing the receipt, Home Depot stored customers’ emails to create a profile that tracked their purchases.

Home Depot apparently provided Meta with the list of emails to take advantage of a Meta program that allowed a company to track the success of its Facebook ad campaigns.

The company could apparently see how many customers saw a Facebook ad for a particular product and made the purchase in real life — if the email they gave Home Depot was also associated with their Facebook account.

The program’s goal was to give businesses insight into how many customers made offline purchases that were similar to online ads they saw on Facebook.

“Based on representations from Meta, Home Depot says it understood that Meta would delete all of the hashed email strings once the matching process was complete,” the BC Supreme Court certification of the class action reads.

Home Depot estimated that it shared close to seven million customer emails with Meta between 2018 and 2022.

The question was also the subject of a Ontario Privacy Commissioner (OPC) investigation that began in 2021.

In a 2023 release on the case, the OPC said the complainant tried to delete his Facebook account when he learned the social media company had a record of most of his Home Depot purchases. The OPC said neither Meta nor Home Depot obtained customers’ consent to share that information. Home Depot stopped the practice in 2022 at the OPC’s recommendation.

But Merchant Law Group believes its customers deserve more than Home Depot changing its practices. The company is pursue the Canada-wide class actionopen to anyone who made a purchase at a physical Home Depot store and provided their email between May 1, 2018 and October 31, 2022.

The Supreme Court of BC agreed to certify the case on January 7th. Certification allows the case to proceed through the next steps of the legal process and be heard by the court.

“Today’s business landscape involves the use and deployment of personal information about large numbers of individuals, each of whom may have a limited ability to assert or protect their rights,” the judge wrote.

“I am confident that a class action is the preferred procedure in this matter and will provide a fair, efficient and manageable method of resolving the common issues and advancing the case.”

Home Depot has been contacted for comment.

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