Plaintiffs have repurposed decades-old wiretapping statutes to attack ordinary website analytics, and hospital and retailer pixels have drawn both suits and regulator attention. This hub tracks how courts are dividing on those theories.
VPPA
August 24, 2026
The VPPA is short, oddly drafted, and enforced entirely by private plaintiffs rather than by any agency. This guide walks the statute section by section: the four definitions that set its perimeter, the six disclosures it permits, the consent form Congress rewrote in 2013, the records-destruction duty a court of appeals has held is not privately enforceable, and the damages that drive the docket.
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Pixel Tracking
August 24, 2026
Plaintiffs suing over analytics pixels, session recording and web chat rarely plead a privacy statute. They plead eavesdropping laws written for telephone wires in 1967 and 1968, which carry per-violation damages and no requirement to prove loss. This guide sets out the statutory elements those claims turn on, the party-consent question that decides most of them, and the newer pen-register theory.
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VPPA
August 12, 2026
The Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 after a newspaper published a Supreme Court nominee's video rental history. It now generates a steady stream of claims against websites that embed video and third-party tracking pixels. Two questions divide the courts: who counts as a subscriber, and what qualifies as personally identifiable information.
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