Meta Allowed to Respond to Expert Witness in Pixel Privacy Suit

U.S. District Judge William Orrick for Northern California in San Francisco said Meta can file by Nov. 23 a supplemental response objecting to the declaration of an expert witness in support of an injunction to bar Meta from intercepting or disseminating patient information collected through its Pixel tracking tool, in Orrick’s order Monday (docket 3:22-cv-03580). The large privacy class action alleged in mid-June that when a patient communicates with a healthcare provider’s website where the Pixel tool is present, its source code causes the exact content of the patient’s communication with the healthcare provider to be redirected to Facebook in a fashion that identifies the user as a patient. The expert witness, Christo Wilson, a Northeastern University computer sciences associate professor, said in his Oct. 26 declaration that Meta could easily comply with an injunctive relief order by using its existing filtering tools and web-crawlers, with “slight modifications.” Meta also could “immediately disable any Pixel that it finds have sent patient data in the past, in addition to their existing practice of notifying the developer who created the Pixel,” it said. Meta objected to the Wilson declaration and asked Orrick to strike it because Meta lacked an opportunity to respond to it, said his order Monday. Though Orrick denied the request to strike the declaration, he will permit Meta to respond to it, it said. After that, “no further briefing with regards to the motion for a preliminary injunction shall be allowed,” said Orrick’s order. He will let the parties know later if he wants to hear argument on Meta’s supplemental declaration, it said.