Credit: Amanz on Unsplash San Diego County has sued AppLovin, a mobile advertising technology company. The county alleges that AppLovin bypassed parental controls to serve ads for adult dating services, alcohol, vaping and graphic sexual content in games played by children. The complaint was filed with San Diego Superior Court on Monday, Bloomberg reported. According to the complaint, AppLovin collected sensitive data from children’s devices even when parental controls and ad-tracking opt-outs were enabled.
This included “information precise enough to pinpoint where kids live, where they study and whether they are sleeping”. Apple and Google offer ways to block ad tech companies from tracking children’s digital activity. The complaint says AppLovin bypassed these settings with fingerprinting. It used the technique to track children for ad targeting without parental consent, the complaint alleges.
AppLovin “disregards child safety tools to harvest children’s sensitive personal information” to “feed it into the company’s artificial intelligence advertising engine”, the complaint says. What the screenshots show The suit alleges that AppLovin shows ads depicting sex acts, such as bondage, in apps marked appropriate for kids. One screenshot in the complaint shows an ad for a sexualised AI chatbot app in a physics-based puzzle game. The game was installed on an Android device configured for a six-year-old, with Google’s parental controls enabled.
Another screenshot shows ads for cannabis gummies on a device with the same controls. AppLovin did not immediately respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment. “AppLovin does not knowingly collect personal information from children or serve Advertisements to children,” its policies for ad buyers say. The policies, in force since 18 June, prohibit sexually explicit or other adult content, tobacco and nicotine, and illegal drugs. Alcohol ads need AppLovin’s approval.
Ads to children, and ads for products generally prohibited for under-18s, are barred. Advertisers are “solely responsible” for determining whether a user qualifies as a child, the policies say. Earlier fingerprinting claims In 2025, short sellers Fuzzy Panda and Muddy Waters accused AppLovin of harvesting proprietary identifiers from other platforms in an unauthorised manner. They said it used them to track users across websites and apps.
Chief executive Adam Foroughi wrote in a March 2025 blog post that the reports were “littered with inaccuracies”. He denied creating “alternative accurate and persistent identifiers, typically called device fingerprints”. The US Securities and Exchange Commission probed AppLovin’s data collection, Bloomberg reported in October 2025, citing people familiar with the matter. The SEC was responding to a whistleblower complaint and the short-seller reports, they said.
It had not accused AppLovin of wrongdoing. Chief financial officer Matt Stumpf said on an earnings call in August that the agency had closed its investigation without recommending enforcement action. A new county unit The San Diego case is one of three filed on Monday by the county’s new Consumer Fairness and Public Protection Unit. Local officials set it up in response to what they describe as dwindling federal enforcement of consumer protections.
In July, a judge cleared several US states to try their claim that Meta hooked children on Facebook and Instagram. The unit is also suing Roblox, for inadequate protections to stop adults posing as children and contacting young users. Roblox already faces other lawsuits over child safety. In May, two advocacy groups asked the FTC to investigate it.
The third suit targets 3D-printing materials firm Polymaker, for marketing certain materials to people assembling illegal, untraceable guns. The shareholder suit AppLovin also faces a securities class action in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Stephen Talbot filed it on 16 September. It names the company, Foroughi and Stumpf.
The complaint covers investors who bought or acquired AppLovin securities between 12 February and 5 August 2026. AppLovin told investors it was “constantly improving” its AI models, the complaint says. “We don’t really see a reason why that’s going to slow down,” the company told investors, according to the complaint. The suit alleges that the defendants overstated how constantly AppLovin was improving its AI models. It says they overstated the benefits of the “virtuous cycle” and “compounding” value proposition the models offered.
It also alleges that the generative AI video creative feature for AppLovin Ads faced significant development delays. These made its release on AppLovin’s timeline unlikely, the suit alleges. Two falls in the share price On 13 July, a Bank of America Securities analyst note said that “AppLovin’s eCommerce footprint expanded at a slower pace in June”. Weekly data had “not shown a clear uptick” since AppLovin Ads opened to all e-commerce advertisers on 22 June, the note said.
The shares fell $64.13, or 12.65%, from $506.80 to $442.85. After the market closed on 5 August, AppLovin reported quarterly revenue of $1.92bn, against consensus estimates of $1.94bn. It attributed the miss in part to delays in rolling out the video tool, according to the complaint. The shares fell $82.13 the next day, or 19.66%, from $417.80 to $335.67. “Our pace of meaningful model improvement was lighter than normal during the quarter,” management said on 5 August, according to the complaint.
Foroughi also said the video tool was “still [a] work in progress”, the complaint says. AppLovin lost more than $44bn of its market capitalisation across the two falls, according to law firm Hagens Berman. The firm has opened an investigation into the claims. Investors have until 16 November to ask the court to appoint them to lead the case.
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