Here is roughly how a Meta Pixels lawsuit works. A hospital puts a small piece of Meta’s code on its website, because it wants to buy ads. You, a patient, click around the site looking at, say, information about a medical condition. The pixel quietly tells Meta what you did. A plaintiffs’ lawyer then argues that when the hospital’s website transmitted your clicks to Meta, the hospital was eavesdropping on a private conversation — your conversation with the hospital — and eavesdropping is illegal under state wiretap law. Multiplying this by every hospital, retailer and football league with a website has produced a litigation genre numbering in the hundreds of cases.
The genre just lost a state. The Washington Supreme Court has dismissed a pixel case against Seattle Children’s Hospital, on grounds that are, as the law professor and blogger Eric Goldman puts it, “highly technical” — and also, if you think about them for a moment, kind of devastating. Washington’s Privacy Act restricts the interception of private communications between “two or more individuals.” The court’s point is that a hospital is not an individual. A hospital is a corporation. And when you click on a corporate website, no human at the corporation is on the other end of the line; an automated system is. So:
no party disputes that SCH is a corporation, and each communication involved only one of the plaintiffs and a fully automated system SCH owns and operates. Thus, under the plain language of RCW 9.73.030(1), the plaintiffs did not communicate with an “individual” when searching or clicking and receiving automated responses.
That’s it. The wiretap law protects conversations among people, the conversation here had exactly one person in it, and one is less than two. You can see the plaintiffs’ problem: the theory of these cases is that your browser session is an intimate exchange between you and your doctor’s office, and the court replied that the doctor’s office, legally speaking, wasn’t there. A concurring judge did try to keep a door open, adding that private communications between an individual and actual human beings working for a corporation remain protected by the privacy act. So if a Seattle Children’s employee had personally sat at a terminal reading your clicks in real time, you might have a claim. As the technology industry has worked very hard to arrange, nobody does that.
Goldman is careful about scope: the ruling turned entirely on the text of Washington’s particular ECPA-equivalent statute, so it doesn’t automatically travel to other states or other doctrines. But it does, he writes, essentially end Meta Pixel plaintiffs’ ability to bring claims under Washington’s communications-privacy law — one path to victory closed, even if the cases themselves survive on other theories.
The bigger question he raises is about the whole industry. Pixel cases, he notes, routinely survive motions to dismiss in the lower courts, which is where plaintiff-side momentum and settlement leverage live. But on appeal they “have repeatedly turned sour,” and appellate rulings can hollow out dozens or hundreds of lower-court decisions at once. “I continue to wonder if the entire Meta Pixels litigation industry — a massive enterprise with hundreds of lawsuits — may be founded on legally unstable grounds,” he writes, adding that some or all of the energy invested in it has been “socially unproductive.” Which is a polite way of saying the lawyers may be building a tower on a trapdoor.
There is an appealing loopiness to the result either way. If the plaintiffs are right, then a mouse click on a hospital’s homepage is a two-party private communication entitled to wiretap protection, and every analytics dashboard in America is a listening device. If the court is right, then the more thoroughly a company automates itself, the fewer legal duties it has to the people typing into it — privacy as a service that scales inversely with headcount. The case is Baker v. Seattle Children’s Hospital, decided October 8, 2026. Somewhere, a fully automated system is reading about it, and no one is intercepting anything.