Home Depot of Canada broke the law when it shared encoded email addresses and other customer data with Facebook owner Meta without consent, Canada's privacy regulator found.   Home Depot shared customers' electronic receipts with the social media giant through Meta's offline conversions program.     The data — which included customers' email addresses and in-store purchase information — was sent to Meta to determine if the customer had a Facebook account. If so, Meta compared the customers' purchased items to ads they had seen on the platform in order to measure their effectiveness. Meta also used the data for targeted advertising and other purposes not related to Home Depot, Canada's privacy commissioner found. In a report released this week, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said Home Depot violated Canada's federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) by providing the data to Meta without customer consent. While Home Depot has since halted the program, he warned that other organizations may be doing the same thing. “This practice is not consistent with privacy law and has to stop,” Dufresne said.