Ballejos

BACKGROUND

In July 2018, plaintiffs sued Facebook for declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging Facebook’s data privacy practices violated the UCL and FAL. Plaintiffs alleged that a third party (Aleksandr Kogan) created a Facebook app called “This Is Your Digital Life.” The app presented as a personality test that collected data for academic research, but it also obtained the user’s consent to access the user’s data, as well as the data of the user’s Facebook friends without obtaining the friends’ consent. Thus, although approximately 300,000 users took the personality test, the app was able to access information of over 70 million Facebook users in the United States alone. Some or all of that data was then sold to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, which used it to sell targeted advertising during the 2016 presidential campaign. Plaintiffs alleged that although Facebook learned that the app violated Facebook’s policies “as early as 2015,” Facebook users were not notified until 2018. Ballejos individually alleged that she “has a Facebook account and received a notification that her personal data may have been accessed” by a third-party application “without her…