SOMI Foundation Launches Collective Action in Germany Against Meta’s Secret Tracking on Facebook and Instagram!

Rotterdam (Netherlands), Berlin (Germany) – September the 11th, 2025 – The Dutch non-profit foundation Stichting Onderzoek Marktinformatie (SOMI) announces filing a legal action in Germany against Meta. The collective lawsuit calls out on Meta for the unlawful surveillance practices that the Tech Giant set up at the detriment of Facebook and Instagram users through its so-called “Business Tools” and clandestine “localhost tracking” on Android devices.

Sep Thu 11 2025

For years, Meta has embedded its Business Tools into millions of websites and apps, including news portals, medical platforms, dating services and websites, some of them covering deeply personal topics such as fertility and addiction. Meta’s tools collect sensitive information such as health status, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political views without users’ consent. The lawsuit filed by SOMI reveals that such data would be used for profiling purposes, allowing Meta to track individuals across the internet. These practices are in breach of the GDPR, which requires that users give their free, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent before running similar programmes.

The lawsuit further exposes Meta’s concealed “localhost tracking” method, recently uncovered in an outstanding research conducted in a joint effort by the IMDEA Networks (Spain), Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands), and KU Leuven (Belgium). The action aims at holding Meta accountable for the manipulatory practice that it undertook between September 2024 and June 2025, whereby Facebook and Instagram apps on Android devices were tweaked so to bypass system protections and intercept users’ browsing activity. The tool was able to function even in incognito mode, under a VPN and, most unforgivingly, after the users had rejected cookies and similar tracking technologies through consent management systems.. This surveillance practice gave Meta unauthorized access to intimate internet traffic, violating the principles of confidentiality and integrity that lay at the basis of European data protection law.

That’s not it: the lawsuit was filed in the context of SOMI’s ongoing efforts to stop Meta’s unlawful practices in Europe, in the aim of holding American and Chinese tech giants alike more and more accountable under European law.

Demands

SOMI demands that Meta immediately halts the unlawful surveillance of users through its Business Tools. In addition, Meta must compensate affected Facebook and Instagram users appropriately, and in an amount that falls nothing short of EUR1,000 per each year of use since May 25, 2018, as well as provide additional compensation of EUR 2,000 to Android users, whose devices were unlawfully infiltrated by localhost tracking between September 2024 and June 2025.

Registration for the lawsuit

All affected individuals and their legal representatives will soon be able to register free of charge with the German Federal Office of Justice (Bundesamt für Justiz) via means of the class action register for such collective claims.

Alternatively, consumers can already register directly with SOMI via www.facebookclaim.de. Registration for a claim via SOMI costs €7.50. This fee will be used for financing SOMI's advocacy work throughout Europe and will entitle subscribers to news updates and the membership to our affiliate participants programme.

Consumers may also register a complaint via the SOMI App, available on the App Store and Google Play.

Legal Representation

SOMI is represented by the law firm Spirit Legal (Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Dresden), which specialises in strategic litigation on digital issues and collective legal actions.