If you’ve followed the explosion of Meta Pixel privacy suits, you’ve probably noticed how dramatic the pleadings can be. Every click is suddenly “sensitive,” every page view becomes “confidential medical information,” and every analytics tool is framed as a surveillance device. But Wright v. TrueCare out of the Southern District of California is one of those moments where the court steps in and says, very calmly: show me the actual facts.
That’s why this order stood out to me. It’s not anti-privacy, and it’s not minimizing digital tracking concerns. It’s just grounding these cases back in reality.
The plaintiff visited a healthcare site six times. Meta Pixel logged six events. Instead of telling the court what any of those searches were, what pages she viewed, or what her browsing actually revealed, she relied on broad statements about “private and confidential health information.” Courts used to tolerate that level of generality at the pleading stage. Not anymore. Judge Simmons makes it clear: in 2025, if you’re going to call something PHI, you need to show the PHI.
Not the possibility of it. Not the fear of it.
Your actual data.
And honestly, this is where so many Pixel complaints fall apart. Plaintiffs keep assuming that because a website relates to healthcare, everything becomes medical information. But as the court points out, unless you’re talking about patient portals, condition-specific pages, prescription lookup tools, or something that inherently reveals health status, simply landing on a public webpage doesn’t transform metadata into HIPAA-level information.
It’s a reality check in the best way!
That same logic carries through the court’s treatment of the ECPA and CIPA claims. Everyone in this field knows the “contents vs. record information” battle. The Ninth Circuit has said over and over (hello, Zynga): URLs, Facebook IDs, and basic routing data are not contents. And when a plaintiff doesn’t plead contents, courts won’t infer them. The party-exception issue doesn’t even get resolved here because the claim already failed at the first, most basic element.
Then there’s the constitutional privacy claim, and again, the court is consistent. If you’re going to claim an egregious intrusion, you have to show what private information was intruded upon. You can’t just point at the existence of the Pixel and call it a breach of social norms. The court wanted the “what,” and the complaint didn’t give it. But here’s the part I love, and the part the privacy bar should start paying real attention to: the pen register claim survives. Easily. Smoothly. Almost effortlessly. Why, might you ask? Because, unlike the other claims, the pen register statute actually fits how the Pixel operates: it captures addressing and routing information tied to a user. And that’s all § 638.51 needs. No content. No PHI. No medical storyline.
This pattern is becoming more common in Pixel litigation: the flashy privacy claims fall away, and the “boring” pen register claim ends up being the one that has real legs. Plaintiffs ignore it; courts don’t.
What Wright shows us is that Pixel cases aren’t going anywhere, but courts will only entertain the ones that bring real specificity. Screenshots matter. URLs matter. Identified search terms matter. Plaintiffs can’t rely on the technology sounding invasive; they have to show how it was invasive for them. And when a complaint doesn’t do that, judges aren’t going to carry it over the finish line out of sympathy for the broader privacy debate.
To put it very crisply: when Pixel cases meet reality, the speculation drops out, the legal standards tighten, and only the claims that actually match the technology survive. And honestly? That makes the whole CIPA landscape sharper, cleaner, and more credible.
