Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, of the Northern District of California, denied defendant’s motion to dismiss alleging improper mobile-app tracking.
Background. Plaintiff alleged that InMobi’s embedded software-development kit collected and transmitted precise geolocation, mobile advertising IDs, IP addresses, device-fingerprinting information, app-use data, and related identifiers from a dating app without consent. He asserted a CIPA Section 638.51 pen-register claim, California common-law intrusion upon seclusion, and a California constitutional privacy claim.
The Court’s Analysis. The court held that modern tracking technology can qualify as a pen register where it records or decodes routing, addressing, or signaling information. The alleged collection of timestamped location, advertising IDs, IP addresses, and device-fingerprinting data was sufficient at the pleading stage.
InMobi’s remaining arguments also fail to persuade. InMobi argues “Caldwell does not allege that InMobi tracked his browsing activity across websites, monitored his web browsing history, or used cookies or pixels to follow him across the internet to his private internet destinations.” Reply at 13. However, he does allege, among other things, that InMobi can “monitor users with unsettling precision. It can pinpoint which exact store, restaurant, school, or building a person enters; measure how long they remain inside; track how often and at what times they return; and detect visits to competitors. InMobi even works to pinpoint the exact location of a user’s home.” FAC ¶ 36. This, together with the other allegations discussed above, is sufficient for Caldwell’s pen register claim to survive the instant motion.
The court also found a plausible privacy injury: the alleged data collection could be linked through identity-resolution services to persistent profiles revealing sensitive information about the plaintiff’s sexuality, movements, habits, and interests. The court declined to resolve consent or the alleged offensiveness of the intrusion on a motion to dismiss.
Significance. The decision supports privacy and CIPA claims where plaintiffs plead specific identifiers, precise location data, cross-device identity resolution, and sensitive inferences—not merely routine technical data collection.
Caldwell v. InMobi Pte Ltd., No. 25-CV-09977-AMO, 2026 WL 1162828 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 29, 2026).
