August 19, 2025
Mark Zuckerberg has better things to do than sit for a deposition.
Or so lawyers for Meta Platforms suggest in a pending petition to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, objecting to the billionaire CEO being forced to give testimony in a proposed privacy class action.
The company invokes a controversial principle known as the apex doctrine to claim Zuckerberg should be spared the hot seat, arguing that he has no “unique” knowledge of the case, and plaintiffs’ lawyers could get the same information from lower-level Meta employees.
Plaintiffs want to question the CEO about allegations that Meta obtained private health information from millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent via its Pixel tracking tool. The claims echo those in a class action by users of fertility tracking app Flo Health, where a San Francisco jury on August 1 found Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act. Damages are yet to be determined, but as I previously noted, the total could be huge.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco agreed with U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi and gave the plaintiffs a green light to depose Zuckerberg. However, the judge limited the session to a maximum of three hours and narrowed the scope of allowable questions to center on a consent decree Meta entered into with the Federal Trade Commission involving the Flo app and Zuckerberg’s role as a final decisionmaker on privacy-related matters.
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Plaintiffs’ lawyers counter that state and federal procedural rules already allow subpoenaed witnesses to contest demands for their testimony. There should be “no special dispensation from civil discovery for corporate executives simply because of their status as titans of industry,” wrote lawyers from Gibbs Mura; Simmons Hanly Conroy; Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll; Kiesel Law; and Terrell Marshall Law Group.
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Plaintiffs’ lawyers, in justifying their request to question Zuckerberg, argue that from the start he’s been implicated in the case. “He had personal knowledge of Meta’s intent to receive this information,” they allege, “and he knew about and played a key role in Meta’s collection of sensitive health data.”
The appeals court has not indicated when it will rule on the petition, but Meta lawyers notified the district court that Zuckerberg’s deposition may proceed this month in Palo Alto if the 9th Circuit denies its mandamus petition by August 21.
Read Can Zuckerberg Duck Deposition in Meta Privacy Class Action?.