Facts

Lawrence Olin, Harold Nyanjom, Sheron Smith-Jackson, Janice Vega-Latker, Mark Boehm, and Raven Winham filed an action against Facebook, Inc., now known as Meta Platforms, Inc., on behalf of a class of all persons in the United States who installed the Facebook Messenger and Facebook Lite apps for Android, and granted Facebook permission to access their contact list.

PLAINTIFFS' CONTENTIONS: Plaintiffs contended that when they installed the Messenger and Facebook Lite mobile phone applications on their android devices, defendant misleadingly prompted them for permission to collect plaintiffs' contact lists and actually collected not only contacts, but also call and text logs. Plaintiffs also contended that defendant was required to share or disseminate the scraped user data because defendant had arrangements with entities such as Apple and UPS to share its user data. Plaintiffs claimed that they suffered an invasion of privacy as a result of defendant collecting their call logs and text data without authorization and were deprived of any income that defendant generated through unauthorized use or sale of plaintiffs call logs and text data. The statutory claims that plaintiffs asserted on behalf of the California subclass were violation of the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act (CLRA); the California Unfair Competition Law (UCL); the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA); and a California constitutional right to privacy. On behalf of all class members, plaintiffs brought common law claims of intrusion upon seclusion; trespass to personal property; and unjust enrichment.

DEFENDANT'S CONTENTIONS: Defendant denied all contentions. Defendant argued that the complete language of Facebook's contact upload prompt required dismissal. Defendant also asserted that plaintiffs' conclusory allegations of deprivation of income and invasion of privacy did not satisfy Article III's injury-in-fact requirement. Defendant contended that plaintiffs' claims each had fatal claim-specific defects: plaintiffs failed to plead statutory standing to bring claims under the UCL and CLRA; plaintiffs failed to state a claim under the CLRA because they failed to plead that they were consumers who purchased or leased goods; plaintiffs failed to state a claim for violation of CDAFA because they failed to plead unauthorized access to a computer that caused harm; plaintiffs failed to state a claim for trespass to chattel because they did not adequately plead that they were deprived of their use of their android devices; plaintiff failed to state a claim for intrusion upon seclusion because they did not adequately plead a legally protected privacy interest or serious invasion of privacy; and plaintiffs could not bring a standalone claim for unjust enrichment.

Result

Settlement agreement for non-monetary relief. Pursuant to the settlement agreement, defendant shall delete all call and text history data uploaded from persons in the United States through the Facebook Messenger or Facebook Lite apps for Android devices that defendant is not otherwise legally obligated to preserve by jurisdictions outside of the United Sates.