Judge throws out DC’s privacy lawsuit against Meta

A judge has dismissed the lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorney general of Washington, DC, which alleged Meta’s “lax” privacy policies led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as reported earlier by The New York Times. In a ruling on Thursday, Superior Court Judge Maurice A. Ross found that “Facebook did not materially mislead consumers as to their response to Cambridge Analytica.”

In this ruling, however, Judge Ross argues that Meta took “a number of enforcement actions” against the third-party app in question, ordered it to delete the data it had on users, and started an investigation. “While the District may disagree with Facebook’s approach to the situation, there is no legal basis that required Facebook to act differently,” the ruling reads. “The actions that Facebook took were consistent with its stated policies.”

“We respectfully disagree with the Court’s decision and are considering all of our options,” Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, the press secretary for DC’s office of the attorney general, says in a statement to The Verge. Meta declined to comment.