• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, Yesterday

Handing Meta Platforms a victory, a federal appellate court on Friday said the company can proceed with an attempt to block a Federal Trade Commission effort to impose new restrictions on teens' data.

The ruling, issued by a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, reversed a decision issued last year by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, who ruled that he lacked jurisdiction to intervene in a privacy battle.

The appellate decision comes in a dispute dating to 2023, when the FTC proposed prohibiting Meta from using minors' data to fuel ad-targeting or algorithms. The agency banned Meta from launching new products or service, unless an assessor confirmed that the company's privacy program has no weaknesses.

Those new restrictions terms would have modified the FTC's 2020 consent decree with Meta, which stemmed from charges that Meta allowed Cambridge Analytica and other outside developers to access users' data. The consent decree required Meta to pay $5 billion, and also called for the company to implement new privacy oversight and obtain an independent assessment.

In May 2023, when the agency sought to impose additional terms, it alleged in an administrative complaint that an evaluator had identified “several gaps and weaknesses” in the company's privacy program, and that between 2017 and 2019, Meta's Messenger Kids had coding errors that allowed children to communicate with people who hadn't been approved by parents, in violation of representations about the feature.

The FTC claimed those glitches violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act -- which requires companies to obtain parental permission before collecting personal information of children under 13 -- and partially justified the proposed modifications.

Meta then petitioned Kelly to prevent the FTC from proceeding with its administrative complaint at an in-house hearing. The company argued that only a federal court -- not the FTC itself -- could order revisions to the consent decree, which Kelly approved in April 2020.

Kelly ruled that even though Meta's agreement with the FTC was attached as an exhibit to the judgment he approved, he didn't retain jurisdiction over the agreement.

Meta then appealed that ruling to the D.C. Circuit, which said Friday Kelly still had jurisdiction over the settlement agreement. The ruling returns the case to Kelly with instructions to consider Meta's substantive arguments.