Tesla Asks Court to Drop CIPA Tracking Pixels Class Action
Tesla asked a federal court to drop a class-action complaint against the company based on the plaintiff not meeting certain provisions of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). Tesla argued Friday that the plaintiff failed to show he suffered an injury, plausibly state a claim or prove jurisdiction to bring the case.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Privacy Daily provides accurate coverage of newsworthy developments in data protection legislation, regulation, litigation, and enforcement for privacy professionals responsible for ensuring effective organizational data privacy compliance.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for Central California (case 5:25-cv-01982), the lawsuit alleges Teska violated CIPA through the use of tracking pixels on its website without the knowledge or consent of visitors (see 2508010042). The plaintiff, Peter Dawidzi, said the tracking pixels acted as "pen register" and "trap and trace" devices, which violate CIPA. Additionally, he claimed violations of the California Business & Professions Code and other state laws.
“Peter Dawidzik alleges that he once visited Tesla’s website and, because of tracking scripts enabled on the site, metadata about his web browser was shared with third parties,” Tesla said. “That is all. Yet he has now sued Tesla in federal court, seeking statutory damages on behalf of a class of people who also visited Tesla’s website,” a “frivolous complaint” that “should be dismissed.”
The car company said Dawidzik failed to meet the jurisdiction standard set in Briskin v. Shopify (see 2504210030), since he didn't “allege specific jurisdiction over Tesla for his claims,” by alleging “nothing beyond the mere fact that he ‘was in California when he visited the Website.’”
Tesla further argued that Popa v. Microsoft raised the standards for claiming a concrete privacy injury (see 2508270052). Since “Dawidzik ‘identifies no embarrassing, invasive, or otherwise private information collected by’ the alleged pixel trackers,” he cannot allege an injury.