Privacy advocates won a major victory on Monday when a lawsuit against Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica scandal was allowed to move forward. The San Mateo Superior Court judge, in what the plaintiffs believe to be a significant step for privacy, held that the plaintiffs have adequately pled an injury and have standing for the case to continue.

As has been previously discussed on this blog, the plaintiffs alleged causes of action in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL) and False Advertising Law (FAL) due to the unauthorized acquisition of Facebook profile data by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook demurred, arguing that the plaintiffs had not been injured solely as a result of unauthorized access to data and as a result lacked standing under California’s Proposition 64. On Monday, the judge overruled Facebook’s demurrer and allowed the case to proceed.

We are lucky to have S. Clinton Woods, senior associate at Audet & Partners and the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in this action (and a fellow Hastings alum), here to discuss the lawsuit and the path forward.

Facebook made international news recently when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, used the personal data of tens of millions of people it got from Facebook to assist Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. A recent lawsuit against Facebook alleges that Facebook violated California law in culling and selling the data to Cambridge Analytica. Now, a new development in the case could fundamentally change how we think about the viability of such data-related lawsuits.

For those unfamiliar with Cambridge Analytica, the alleged story, in a nutshell, is the following: a Russian professor named Aleksandr Kogan released a personality test app called This Is Your Digital Life. However, TIYDL did more than store the survey results. The app reached into the Facebook profiles of the more than 300,000 users who granted Kogan consent, as well as the profiles of all of those users’ Facebook friends (who did not grant consent, obviously). According to Mark Zuckerberg, TIYDL might have accessed as many as 87 million accounts, though even Facebook is not quite sure how many or whose information was taken. Kogan then sold the data to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, who used the data to assist the Trump campaign.