Author: Bassam F. Gergi

In Rodriguez v. Autotrader.com, Inc., the District Court for the Central District of California dismissed, with prejudice, a class action lawsuit claiming that Autotrader.com violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) by allowing third-party tracking software to be installed on a website visitor’s browser before the visitor had any opportunity to consent to or decline the website’s privacy policy. The plaintiff’s complaint alleged that she was a “tester” – i.e., someone who seeks out legal violations and files lawsuits to ensure compliance – who visited the Autotrader.com website and made a search query purportedly containing confidential and private information. The complaint alleged that once a query is entered in the search bar, it is routed to unknown third parties and shared with other third parties like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and various other advertising services. The complaint asserted that the use of the tracking technology violated California’s wiretapping and eavesdropping statute, CIPA § 631(a), as well as CIPA § 638.51, which prohibits the use of pen registers and trace devices. In January 2025, the district court dismissed the plaintiff’s CIPA § 631 claims without prejudice for lack of standing because the complaint merely alleged that the plaintiff made a search query containing confidential and private information but “fail[ed] to describe the contents of her query.”...

In Lee v. Springer Nature America, Inc., Judge Lewis J. Liman in the Southern District of New York held that a longtime subscriber to Scientific American plausibly alleged, on behalf of a putative class, that the website violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA) based on its use of website tracking technology. The plaintiff, a 10-year subscriber, filed a complaint alleging that Scientific American unlawfully installed a code known as “Meta Pixel” on its website. The Meta Pixel supposedly transmitted information to Meta (formerly known as Facebook) about the subscriber’s use of the site (including Facebook ID, URLs accessed, and titles of videos viewed) in exchange for Meta providing advertising capabilities to Scientific American. Scientific American moved to dismiss the complaint on two grounds: first, that the plaintiff lacked standing because he had not suffered an injury, and second, that the plaintiff did not plead the elements required to state a claim under the VPPA. Judge Liman rejected both arguments. Citing the Second Circuit’s recent decision in Salazar v. National Basketball Association, Judge Liman held that the plaintiff’s allegations that he was a subscriber to Scientific American, that Scientific American disclosed to Meta the plaintiff’s personal information (Facebook ID, URLs accessed, and titles of videos viewed), and that Meta used this information without...