• by Wendy Davis , March 19, 2026

The judge who is presiding over a privacy battle between Android users and Meta Platforms has indicated that she plans to explore whether people who accepted Meta's privacy policy consented to being tracked while browsing the mobile web.

The Android users claim Meta covertly tracked their browsing activity on mobile websites that embed its analytics pixel, and then linked that activity to their identities.

Meta argued the suit should be thrown out for several reasons, including that the users consented to the alleged data collection by accepting the company's privacy policy. That policy "broadly discloses" that Meta collects identifiers from advertising partners and "uses these identifiers to match users’ browsing activity to their Meta accounts," the company contends.

Counsel for the users disagreed.

"Because Meta’s de-anonymization scheme was never disclosed, no reasonable person could have consented to it," the plaintiffs' lawyers wrote in papers filed last month.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco directed all parties to plan to address questions related to consent at an upcoming hearing -- including whether the disclosures in Meta's privacy policy took users' assumptions into account.

"Does Meta agree that background assumptions can limit the scope of consent, even if not expressly stated," Lin wrote in an order issued Thursday.

"For example, if I tell a friend she can stay at my house and treat it as her own, I would be upset if she went through my underwear drawer, because her actions exceeded the scope of what I agreed to, given ordinary social expectations," she continued.

Lin then questioned whether a "similar logic" would apply to the Android users' claims.

She also questioned counsel for the plaintiffs about whether there is "any language that Meta could have included in its privacy policy that would be sufficient to show consent to the activities alleged here."

Lin said she wants each side to address the questions at a March 24 hearing.

The judge's order comes in a dispute dating to June 2025, when California resident Devin Rose (later joined by other plaintiffs) alleged in a class-action complaint that Meta secretly tracked and de-anonymized Android users.

The lawsuit was filed the same day researchers published the report “Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android,” which said Meta exploited localhost -- a feature that allows software developers to test applications -- to capture Android users' mobile browsing data.

Meta stopped the covert tracking the day the report came out, according to the researchers who authored the report.

The complaint includes claims that Meta violated a California wiretapping law, and engaged in “intrusion upon seclusion” -- a claim that can be brought in California over “highly offensive” privacy violations.

The Android users are also suing Google for allegedly failing to employ security measures that would have protected people's data.