• by Wendy Davis , October 20, 2025

A federal judge has dismissed a privacy lawsuit brought by a California resident against Eating Recovery Center, which allegedly shared her data with Meta via its analytics pixel.

The plaintiff, who proceeded as an anonymous Jane Doe, claimed in a class-action complaint that the Eating Recovery Center violated various state laws, including California's wiretap law, by embedding the Meta pixel on its website.

The suit is one of numerous recent cases in which web users claim that online companies violate the California wiretap law by transmitting ad-targeting data to Meta, Google or other companies via analytics tools.

In a sweeping ruling issued Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria not only threw out the claim, but described California's wiretap law as "a total mess," and called for state lawmakers to rewrite the statute.

"The state of affairs with CIPA is untenable," Chhabria wrote, using an acronym for the California Invasion of Privacy Act -- a 1967 law aimed at combatting eavesdropping on telephone calls.

The law "was a mess from the get-go, but the mess gets bigger and bigger as the world continues to change and as courts are called upon to apply CIPA’s already-obtuse language to new technologies," he added.

"Indeed, we have reached the point where it’s often borderline impossible to determine whether a defendant’s online conduct fits within the language of the statute," he wrote, adding: "Courts are issuing conflicting rulings, and companies have no way of telling whether their online business activities will subject  them to liability."

The ruling -- which granted summary judgment to the Eating Recovery Center -- grew out of a complaint brought in 2023 by a woman diagnosed with anorexia. The plaintiff alleged that she visited the Eating Recovery Center's website, where she provided her name and insurance information, took online diagnostic quizzes, and researched eating disorders and treatments.

Soon after, she began receiving ads for Eating Recovery Center on Facebook "that were tailored to her specific eating disorder and symptoms," she alleged.

She also allegedly began receiving targeted email ads from the Eating Recovery Center to an email address associated with her Facebook account.

Her class-action complaint included a claim that the Eating Recovery Center violated California's wiretap law. That statute includes language prohibiting anyone from reading or learning, or attempting to read or learn, the contents of communications in transit, without all parties' consent. The law also prohibits a third party from aiding and abetting the restriction on reading, learning, or attempting to read or learn, the contents of communications in transit.

Chhabria said in the ruling that the language in the statute is "a total mess," and "was not drafted with the internet in mind."

He wrote that the case presented the "hard question" of whether Meta read, attempted to read, or attempted to learn the contents of the communications while they were "in transit."

Ultimately, he found that the material was not "in transit" when Meta read (or attempted to read) it -- although he acknowledged that this finding resulted in a "strange" outcome.

"Regardless of whether it is receiving the communication a second before or after it reaches the website, Meta is effectively engaging in the same conduct," Chhabria wrote.

"Arguably, then, the purpose of the statute can only be effectuated by reaching the same result in both instances," he continued. "This argument would have a place if the language were ambiguous. But 'in transit' is not ambiguous."

He added: "And that’s the problem with cases involving the tracking of online activity -- the statutory language was drafted with very different technology in mind, and it does not map properly onto the internet."

Chhabria concluded his opinion by urging state lawmakers to revise the law.

"As difficult as it is to apply CIPA to the physical world, it’s virtually impossible to apply it to the online world," he wrote. "Hopefully, the Legislature will go back to the drawing board on CIPA. Indeed, it would probably be best to erase the board entirely and start writing something new."

Earlier this year, lawmakers in California's senate approved a measure that would have revised the state wiretap law by effectively allowing companies to access communications for "commercial business purposes," including online advertising and internal research.

That bill stalled in the state assembly.