A federal judge just tossed a class action against Meta and four California food banks over the Meta Pixel — that little tracking snippet websites use to feed data back to Facebook for ad targeting. The plaintiffs said the food banks' websites collected sensitive information about their financial hardship and disability status, then shipped it to Meta without consent. Meta used it to serve them ads that, in the plaintiffs' words, "reminded them of their hardship and further stigmatized" them.

The court's reasoning was pretty simple. If you have a Facebook or Instagram account, you already agreed to Meta's terms of service, which say in the privacy policy that META receives data from third-party websites for advertising. You consented. Case dismissed on that front.

As for the food banks, the judge said visiting a public food-resource website isn't enough to show a concrete injury. Even the plaintiffs who answered questions about their finances or disabilities on those sites couldn't point to any case law where that kind of disclosure, or the targeted ads that followed, would count as "traditionally actionable or highly offensive." The class definition got struck too — it covered everyone who visited any of the food banks' websites, which is way too broad when plenty of visitors never entered personal information at all.

The plaintiffs have until May 25 to amend, so this probably isn't over. But the consent-by-terms-of-service argument is a hard wall to climb.

Here's where I'll admit something slightly contradictory: I actually prefer seeing ads for things I might buy. If I'm shopping for a new monitor, show me monitors. That's useful. What I don't want is to be reminded three weeks later about that weird rash I Googled at 2 a.m. There's a line between "helpful targeting" and "hey, we noticed you might have a fungal infection," and I think most people know exactly where it is even if the law hasn't caught up yet.