Washington Supreme Court Dismisses Meta Pixels Case–Baker v. Seattle Children’s Hospital

This is a Meta Pixels case on appeal to the Washington Supreme Court. It fails on a highly technical interpretation of the statute.

The applicable Washington state statute restricts the interception of communications between two individuals. The Supreme Court says that a corporation isn’t an “individual” for purposes of this statute. Thus, the user’s interaction with the corporate-run website didn’t have sufficient human involvement:

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. The WPA provision at issue covers only private communications transmitted between “two or more individuals.”

A concurring judge agrees with the statutory parsing but adds that “private communications transmitted between an individual and individuals working for a corporation are protected by our privacy act.”

Implications

This opinion only dealt with Washington state’s ECPA equivalent and depended entirely on the court’s textual interpretation of that statute. As a result, this ruling isn’t likely to have significant implications for other states’ ECPA-equvalent laws or other legal doctrines.

Still, this ruling essentially ends the ability of Meta Pixel plaintiffs to claim violations of Washington’s ECPA-equivalent communications privacy law. That may not end their cases overall, but it shuts down one path to plaintiff success.

Further, 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. The pixel cases routinely survive a motion to dismiss at the lower court level, but on appeal, the cases have repeatedly turned sour. Those appellate court rulings can undercut dozens or hundreds of other rulings, hollowing out the entire Meta Pixels litigation genre. Plaintiff lawyers have invested a lot of energy in the Pixels cases, and some or all of that has been socially unproductive.

Case Citation: Baker v. Seattle Children’s Hospital, 2026 WL 3023818 (Wash. Supreme Ct. Oct. 8, 2026)

More Posts on the Pixel Cases and Related Claims

• LinkedIn’s Insight Tag Creates Legal Entanglements–Doe v. LinkedIn
• Third Circuit Rejects a Meta Pixels Case–Cole v. Quest Diagnostics
• The Wrap Taxonomy Vexes the Judge in the LinkedIn Insight Tag Cases
• The Second Circuit Is Done With Meta Pixels VPPA Cases–Hughes v. NFL
• Court Rejects Trespass to Chattels Claim Over Placing Cookies–Doe v. Tenet
• Clickwrap Formed Even When a Consumer Has Limited Time to Act–Washington v. Flixbus
• Meta Pixels Case Dismissed by Second Circuit–Solomon v. Triller
• Leaky TOS Formation = No TOS Formation–Snyder v. G6
• The VPPA May Be a Dinosaur Statute, But It’s Very Much Alive in the Second Circuit–Salazar v. NBA
• Pixel Case Against Google “Jumps the Shark”–Doe I v. Google (Catch Up Post)
• Think You Understand Online Trespass to Chattels Law? Think Again–In re Meta Healthcare Pixels
• More Chaos in the Law of Online Contract Formation
• Privacy Lawsuit Based on Website Tracking by Service Provider Trimmed