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October 22, 2026
SANTA FE, N.M. — After a jury decided on liability in a suit brought by the New Mexico attorney general against Meta Platforms Inc., a state court judge on Oct. 21 assessed a $25 billion penalty against Meta, which operates the social media platform Facebook, finding 43,899,720 willful violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act by deceptive trade practices and five willful violations by unconscionable trade practices related to Facebook’s privacy setting that did not give users meaningful control over their data.
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October 22, 2026
FORT MYERS, Fla. — A data privacy putative class action survived a motion to dismiss after a Florida federal judge found that the alleged publication of the wife’s personal information on the dark web and her husband’s efforts to mitigate the resulting risk of identity theft sufficiently allege injury.
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October 20, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — In a supplemental brief filed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there was a search in a geofence warrant case and remanded for the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to address other issues, the government reiterates its arguments that the warrant “satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity” and “the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule precludes suppression.”
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October 16, 2026
SEATTLE — The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed an Idaho federal judge’s decision to dismiss a putative class action brought by individuals whose personal information was disclosed by a health insurance administration company to unauthorized parties after determining that the unauthorized disclosure of protected health information is a concrete injury.
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October 16, 2026
DETROIT — A Michigan bank agreed to pay $31.5 million — including $10.5 million in attorney fees, $311,690.80 in litigation costs and monetary relief and credit monitoring for class members — in a class action settlement after the bank experienced two cyberattacks resulting in data breaches impacting more than 2.18 million employees and customers whose data was compromised.
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October 14, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Video Privacy Protection Act’s (VPPA) reach is not limited to video-related services, the attorney representing a California man who brought a putative class complaint regarding data sharing against Paramount Global under the VPPA argued Oct. 14 before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case debating the meaning of “consumer” under the act.
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October 14, 2026
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A California federal judge on Oct. 13 granted a motion for final approval of a $68 million settlement resolving class claims against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. (collectively Google) for allegedly eavesdropping on Google Assistant (GA) users in violation of California’s unfair competition law (UCL) and privacy laws and granted the plaintiffs’ motion for more than $22 million in attorney fees but reduced the named plaintiffs’ service awards.
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October 14, 2026
TAMPA, Fla. — A Florida judge granted final approval of a data privacy settlement in which a nationwide waxing provider has agreed to pay up to $5 million — including one-third of the gross total for class attorney fees, as well as payments to class representatives and members — after third parties allegedly accessed client information without the clients’ consent in violation of federal and state laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
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October 13, 2026
OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Washington Privacy Act (WPA) doesn’t prohibit Seattle Children’s Hospital (SCH) from using Meta Platforms Inc. technology to track the searches and clicks of users of the SCH public website and SCH’s automated responses and from sharing that data with Meta to create targeted ads, the Washington Supreme Court majority ruled in a putative class lawsuit brought by website users.
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October 13, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge in the District of Columbia set aside and vacated a policy under which the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been demanding voter registration lists from states, comparing those lists against citizen databases and then urging states to remove voters it deems ineligible, opining that the policy “flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans.”
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October 07, 2026
MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota federal judge granted final approval to a $12.5 million nonreversionary settlement to be funded by a health system that was accused of installing the Meta Pixel and Google Analytics on its websites, allegedly resulting in the interception and disclosure of patients’ personally identifiable information and protected health information without consent.
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October 06, 2026
DALLAS — Nearly a year after a settlement was preliminarily approved, a Texas federal judge granted final approval to the $177 million deal that resolves multidistrict litigation over two data security incidents involving AT&T Inc., with the delay attributable in part to the original judge’s recusal while the final approval motion was under advisement.
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October 05, 2026
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — An Illinois federal judge excluded two experts’ opinions in their entirety and limited testimony from three others in a certified class action accusing Apple Inc. of violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) through the iOS Photos app’s People album feature, finding in part that certain opinions proposed by the experts are outside the scope of the dispute (Jane Doe, et al. v. Apple Inc., No. 20-421, S.D. Ill., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 224606).
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October 05, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 5 denied a petition for certiorari filed by an individual seeking review of a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement did not violate the Fourth Amendment by viewing a hash-matched Snapchat CyberTip video flagged as child sexual abuse material without a warrant.
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October 05, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 5 denied a doctor’s petition seeking review of the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ ruling that affirmed as modified a lower court’s dismissal of her breach of contract lawsuit seeking business interruption and umbrella coverage for her losses arising from the discovery of hidden cameras at her dermatology office.
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October 02, 2026
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge dismissed a multistate challenge to the U.S. Treasury Department’s decision to give Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-affiliated personnel access to sensitive payment systems and to develop an automated process for flagging federal disbursements, finding that most claims became moot after DOGE expired and its Treasury team was disbanded and that the remaining claims failed because the states did not plausibly allege final agency action.
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October 01, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A trial court did not abuse its discretion in certifying injunctive and damages classes in a lawsuit accusing a company that digitizes yearbooks and offers users various levels of access to the information of violating California’s statutory right of publicity, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled, rejecting the company’s arguments that individual questions predominate and that the lead plaintiff will not adequately represent the injunctive class.
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October 01, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two federal student loan borrowers filed a putative class action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education in a federal court in the District of Columbia on behalf of themselves and other former students of “predatory for-profit institutions,” alleging that they have been deprived of “their legal entitlement to a clean financial slate” when the Education Department represented to consumer credit bureaus that they owe on student loan debts that were extinguished “years ago.”
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October 01, 2026
GREENBELT, Md. — A federal judge in Maryland partially granted federal government parties’ motion to dismiss and dismissed without prejudice a putative Privacy Act class complaint by four former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees who were terminated based on directives issued by the Trump administration and who alleged that their employment records were incomplete and inaccurate, finding that the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) “provides the exclusive means for the Plaintiffs to obtain judicial review of this adverse personnel action.”
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September 29, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — Asserting that “no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement’s use” of cell-site simulators “for real-time tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment,” the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held that such tracking does constitute a search — but summary judgment in favor of the appellees was nonetheless proper because “the detectives are entitled to qualified immunity and state law public official immunity” and the police department “cannot be held liable for the violation of [the appellant’s] Fourth Amendment rights.”
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September 28, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a split decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 25 granted an emergency application filed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to stay, pending appeal, a lower court’s vacatur of 2025 modifications to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, finding that the government was likely to succeed on its argument that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) authorized the challenged information sharing, which incorporated SSA records, permitted searches using full or partial Social Security numbers and bulk queries and expanded citizenship verification measures.
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September 23, 2026
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Missouri state judge granted final approval of a $980,000 nonreversionary common fund that resolves privacy claims brought in a class action by those whose personal and financial information was potentially accessed in a cyberattack on the law firm’s IT network.
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September 23, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel issued its mandate after affirming in a split opinion a lower court’s final approval of a $62 million class action settlement providing injunctive relief and resolving claims that Google LLC unlawfully stored users’ location data after they disabled the “Location History” feature, with the majority holding that direct distribution was infeasible and that the approved cy pres recipients had a sufficient nexus to the class’s privacy interests; one judge dissented on the basis that the record did not establish that direct distribution to class members was infeasible.
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September 23, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia federal judge granted two renewed motions for preliminary injunction and granted in part a third through which three groups of plaintiffs sought to bar enforcement of a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rule imposing new ballot envelope, voter enrollment and verification requirements for the November midterm elections, holding that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that key provisions of the rule exceed the USPS’s statutory authority, including provisions requiring election officials to submit voter-specific information to a federal portal.
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September 23, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Insurers waived their right to respond to a doctor’s petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ ruling affirming as modified a lower court’s dismissal of the doctor’s breach of contract seeking business interruption and umbrella coverage for her losses arising from discovery of hidden cameras at her dermatology office; the doctor is asking to court to address what defines “direct physical loss” in electronic security context.