• by Wendy Davis , June 11, 2026

Meta Platforms is urging a federal judge to authorize an immediate appeal of her recent order requiring the company to face a privacy lawsuit claiming it seretly tracked Android users' browsing activity on some mobile websites and then linked that activity to users' identities.

The tech company's request, filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, grows out of a class-action complaint brought last June by California resident Devin Rose (and later joined by other Android users).

The complaint alleged that between September 2024 and June 2025, Meta exploited Android's localhost -- a feature that allows software developers to test applications -- to connect people's mobile web browsing to their Facebook and Instagram profiles.

Rose specifically alleged that he visited mobile sites with Meta's pixel, including techcrunch.com and wired.com, and that everything he did on those sites -- including the articles he viewed, and searches he conducted -- was collected by Meta, tied to his identity and then used for advertising purposes.

Rose sued the same day researchers published the report “Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android,” which said Meta exploited localhost 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 count that can be brought in California over “highly offensive” privacy violations.

Meta sought a fast dismissal of the lawsuit, arguing that even if the allegations were proven true, they wouldn't give the plaintiffs grounds to sue.

Among other contentions, Meta said the plaintiffs consented to the data collection by accepting Meta's privacy terms. That privacy policy "broadly discloses" that the company collects identifiers from "advertising partners" and uses those identifiers "to match users’ browsing activity to their Meta accounts," the company said.

Lin rejected Meta's argument last month, essentially ruling that its privacy policy may not have given users notice of the alleged data collection.

"If the privacy policy disclosed the practices at issue, it could potentially be sufficient to find consent as a matter of law," she said in a written opinion. "But 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."

Meta now says it wants to appeal that portion of the ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The company argues that an appellate court might interpret the privacy policy based on its language, as opposed to users' expectations.

"A rule of interpretation based on 'reasonable expectations' raises challenging questions about how a court is supposed to decide which 'reasonable expectations' should govern the contract analysis -- as there are often different possible expectations that reasonable people may hold," Meta writes in its motion.

"In particular, when it comes to how technology works, people have widely varying beliefs (or no beliefs at all) depending on how technically savvy they are," the tech company adds.

Counsel for the plaintiffs are expected to file a response with Lin later this month.