• by Wendy Davis , July 15, 2026

Meta Platforms is urging a federal judge to reconsider her earlier decision requiring the company to face claims that it secretly tracked some Facebook and Instagram users' browsing activity on mobile websites and matched that activity to users' identities.

In papers filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, the platform reiterates its argument that users agreed to be tracked by accepting the company's privacy policy, which discloses that it collects data about users' activity on outside sites and connects that information to their accounts.

"Plaintiffs consented to the very matching they now complain about," Meta writes. "That consent defeats every claim."

The new motion comes in a class-action complaint filed last year by Android users who alleged that between September 2024 and June 2025, Meta exploited Android's localhost -- which allows software developers to test applications -- to connect users’ mobile web browsing to their Facebook and Instagram profiles.

The suit was filed the same day researchers published the report “Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android,” which discussed the alleged exploit.

Meta stopped the covert tracking the day the report came out, researchers said in an update to 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.

Meta previously asked Lin to throw out the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs consented to the alleged data collection.

In May, Lin rejected that argument, writing: "A reasonable user could plausibly read the privacy policy to not disclose that Meta would open a backdoor to link their Android web browsing activities to their Meta accounts with absolute certainty."

She added that "seemingly broad text in a disclosure might not provide effective consent if it would be objectively reasonable for a person to interpret the text more narrowly."

At the time, she allowed most claims in the case to proceed, but dismissed a few counts including a claim that Meta violated a provision of the wiretap law that restricts "pen registers" -- historically meaning devices that capture telephone metadata, such as the numbers that are dialed.

That "pen register" claim was dismissed without prejudice, which enabled the plaintiffs to reformulate the claim and bring it again. 

Last month, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that included the claims Lin previously ruled could go forward, as well as the "pen register" claim she previously dismissed.

Meta now argues that the amended complaint should be dismissed in its entirety.

"The court should consider Meta’s arguments anew, closely examine plaintiffs’ allegations and the applicable case law, and ... dismiss the amended complaint," the company writes.

Meta adds that the questions regarding users' consent should be resolved by examining the language in its privacy policy, as opposed to people's "reasonable expectations" regarding data collection.

"Allowing a plaintiff’s alleged 'reasonable expectations' to trump the words of a contract is fundamentally problematic because it makes it impossible to determine what the contract objectively means -- as there are different possible expectations that reasonable people may hold," Meta writes. "In particular, people have widely varying beliefs about how technology works (or no beliefs at all) depending on how technically savvy they are."

The plaintiffs are expected to respond to the new motion by July 29.