Facebook users sue Meta, accusing the company of tracking on iOS through a loophole
Apple’s major privacy update to iOS last year made it much more difficult for apps to track user behavior beyond their own borders, but a new lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta kept snooping through a workaround.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and embedded below, alleges that Meta evaded Apple’s new restrictions by monitoring users through Facebook’s in-app browser, which opens links within the app. The proposed class-action lawsuit, first reported by Bloomberg, could allow anyone affected to sign on, which in Facebook’s case might mean hundreds of millions of U.S. users.
In the lawsuit, a pair of Facebook users allege that Meta is not only violating Apple’s policies, but breaking privacy laws at the state and federal level, including the Wiretap Act, which made it illegal to intercept electronic communications without consent. Another similar complaint (Mitchell v. Meta Platforms Inc.) was filed last week.
The plaintiffs allege that Meta follows users’ online activity by funneling them into the web browser built into Facebook and injecting JavaScript into the sites they visit. That code makes it possible for the company to monitor “every single interaction with external websites,” including where they tap, and what passwords and other text they enter:
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