A seismic legal filing in a UK employment tribunal alleges that Meta engaged in a systematic effort to bypass Apple’s stringent iPhone privacy rules and deliberately inflated its advertising performance metrics, exposing a potential years-long pattern of deception aimed at advertisers and users alike.
The allegations, brought forth by former Meta product manager Samujjal Purkayastha in a case reported by The Financial Times, paint a picture of a company resorting to aggressive tactics to preserve its data-driven advertising empire after Apple’s 2021 privacy update threatened to dismantle it.
At the heart of the claim is a direct challenge to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, which required apps to explicitly ask users for permission to track them across other apps and websites. The change, which most users declined, was a body blow to Meta’s targeted ad business. The company famously predicted it would cost them $10 billion in lost revenue in 2022.
But according to Purkayastha’s filing, Meta didn’t just accept the new rules. It allegedly found a way around them. The former manager claims the company used “deterministic matching”—a method that uses identifiable user information like emails, rather than anonymous data signals—to track user behavior without proper consent. This practice, if proven, constitutes a direct bypass of the spirit and letter of Apple’s ATT policy, which explicitly warned developers that such circumvention could get their apps banned from the App Store.
Meta did not respond to questions about the tracking claim during the hearing.
The filing goes further, alleging a parallel scheme to mislead advertisers about the effectiveness of their campaigns. Purkayastha claims that Meta’s “Shops Ads,” a format for digital storefronts launched in 2022, reported gross sales figures that included taxes and shipping, inflating performance results by up to 19% compared to rivals like Google, which used net sales.
Internal investigations allegedly confirmed the inflation, but advertisers were never informed, leaving them with a skewed and overly optimistic view of their return on investment.
To prop up the fledgling ad product, Purkayastha claims CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally authorized a secret $160 million budget for free ad placements during its testing phase. While subsidies are common in tech, the alleged failure to disclose them risks presenting a false picture of the ads’ organic success.
For critics, these new allegations are not an anomaly but part of a long-standing pattern. In 2016, Meta admitted to overstating average video ad view times by up to 80% for two years. A subsequent 2018 lawsuit alleged metrics were off by as much as 900%, resulting in a $40 million settlement. Another suit over the company’s “Potential Reach” metric, which advertisers claim exaggerated audience size, was allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court just this past January.
The London tribunal case, which won’t see a full ruling until 2026, sharpens the narrative of an escalating cold war between two tech titans. Apple has positioned itself as the privacy-conscious guardian of its ecosystem, even as it builds its own advertising business. Meta, whose lifeblood is the precise targeting of ads, is portrayed as struggling to adapt and willing to stretch boundaries to survive.
For the millions of advertisers who fuel Meta’s revenue engine, the claims are a stark reminder that the metrics inside its “walled garden” are difficult to verify independently. And for users who clicked “Ask App Not to Track,” the case raises a disturbing question: did the company secretly find a way to follow them anyway?
The filing alleges Purkayastha was fired for being a whistleblower; Meta claims it was for poor performance. His case has now pulled back the curtain, suggesting that the battle for privacy and truth in advertising is being fought with secret budgets, inflated numbers, and backdoor data deals.
