Facebook often gets in trouble in Europe for its privacy practices, and that trend continued this week with a privacy rights group called noyb causing yet another problem for the company and its ad partners. The group has alleged that German political parties have violated the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by unlawfully processing voters’ personal data via Facebook.

The GDPR considers political information to belong to a “special category” of data that requires user consent to process.

“We were able to determine that Facebook hadn’t obtained user consent for processing sensitive data and that the parties had targeted users on the basis of (prior) political views,” a noyb spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Neither the parties, nor Facebook had obtained consent from any of the users.”

“Any data on a person’s political views is protected particularly strictly by the GDPR,” a privacy lawyer for the group added. “Such data is not only extremely sensitive but also allows large-scale manipulation of voters, as Cambridge Analytica has shown.”

While this is an immediate problem for these political parties, this claim could also add further problems for Facebook, which is already embroiled in multiple privacy controversies around the world. As usual, most of the company’s problems can be traced back to one simple fact: it wants to gather as much of our personal data as possible no matter the cost.

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