• by Wendy Davis , October 2, 2026

Handing Meta a victory, a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit alleging it wrongly obtains personal information from the state motor vehicles site -- including users' first names, email addresses, and the identities of people who applied for disabled placards.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston in the Northern District of California said the plaintiffs, California residents Mikhail Gershzon and Anacleto DeLeon, lacked "standing" to proceed because they failed to establish that the alleged data collection harmed them.

The decision came in a suit dating to 2023, when Gershzon alleged that Meta gathered personal information from the Department of Motor Vehicles' site through the Meta Pixel -- an analytics tool publishers can embed on their sites.

He claimed in a class-action complaint that Meta “feeds the vast quantities of information obtained from Meta Pixels into its advertising systems, using it to identify users and their personal characteristics, categorize them for Meta’s business purposes, and target them with marketing messages from its advertising clients.”

DeLeon joined the lawsuit last year, alleging in an amended complaint that he visited the Department of Motor Vehicles' site and submitted an online application for a disabled placard.

The complaint claimed Meta violated federal and state privacy laws, including the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act -- which prohibits companies knowingly obtaining personal information from a motor vehicle record for an improper purpose.

Illston ruled that the allegations in the complaint, even if proven true, would not establish that Meta obtained especially sensitive information.

"Viewing the record in the light most favorable to plaintiffs, the record shows the Pixel transmitted to Meta data showing that Gershzon and DeLeon visited the DMV webpages about topics such as changing an address, opting into paperless notices, renewing an ID card, purchasing a copy of a driver’s record, and application pages for a disabled parking placard," she wrote.

"The Pixel did not transmit information about whether any of these transactions were actually completed, nor did the Pixel transmit any substantive information about any transaction, such as plaintiffs’ addresses, driver’s license numbers, or disability status. None of the information transmitted is 'embarrassing, invasive, or otherwise private,'” she added.