• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 2, 2020

A federal judge has dismissed a privacy lawsuit accusing Facebook of surreptitiously storing information about users' locations.

In an opinion issued late last year, U.S. District Court Judge James Donato in the Northern District of California ruled that the allegations in the lawsuit are too vague for the case to move forward.

The ruling stems from a class-action complaint brought in October 2018 by California resident Brett Heeger. He alleged that Facebook “secretly tracks, logs, and stores location data for all of its users -- including those who have sought to limit the information about their locations that Facebook may store in its servers by choosing to turn Location History off.”

His complaint focused on allegations that Facebook stores data about users' “estimated locations,” inferred from their IP addresses, as well as data gleaned from data about WiFi connections. The complaint includes claims that Facebook's alleged IP-logging violates the federal wiretap law and California privacy laws.

Donato said in a 7-page opinion that Heeger's complaint lacked sufficient details about Facebook's alleged activity.

“Heeger alleges only that Facebook collected his 'private' location data,” Donato wrote. “On that bareboned and vague allegation, the court cannot say that he has plausibly pleaded a privacy claim.”

The judge said Heeger could beef up his allegations and file a new complaint by Jan. 27.

Two lawmakers recently criticized Facebook's location-data practices, arguing that the company may be undermining consumers' choices by drawing on information like IP addresses and WiFi networks to figure out people's general locations.

“Location data is among the most sensitive personal information that a user can share with a company,” Sens. Christopher Coons (D-Delaware) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said in a letter sent to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November. “If a user has decided to limit Facebook's access to his or her location, Facebook should respect these privacy choices.”