Supreme Court rejects Facebook's appeal to scale back $15B class action lawsuit

A hot potato: Facebook broadly discloses the fact that it tracks people around the web even if they don’t have accounts, by virtue of social plugins, Facebook-linked logins, Facebook Analytics, as well as ad measurement tools on some websites. However, its attempts to scale back a $15 billion class action lawsuit involving some of those practices have yet to succeed.

Earlier this year, Facebook reportedly considered taking Apple to court over iOS 14’s App Tracking Transparency feature, after running an ample newspaper ad campaign to discredit the Cupertino’s efforts as an anticompetitive practice. On the other hand, Facebook is embroiled in a legal battle of its own over the extensive use of user tracking for targeted advertising.

According to Reuters, the US Supreme Court turned away an appeal made by the social giant in a $15 billion lawsuit that alleges it had repeatedly violated a federal wiretapping law by tracking the internet activity of users beyond Facebook, even when logged off. This also brought the attention of the FTC, compelling the social giant to make several changes to its privacy policy and give users more control over the data collected by the company.