Judge Denies Request to Relate Pixel Tax-Filing, Healthcare Cases

U.S. District Judge William Orrick for Northern California in San Francisco signed an order Wednesday (docket 3:22-cv-03580) denying Meta’s Jan. 9 administrative motion to consider relating two tax-filing Pixel privacy cases to the eight Pixel healthcare privacy cases consolidated under his watch. Orrick’s sparse order gave no explanation for his denial. In a text-only docket entry Wednesday, he assigned the consolidated Pixel healthcare cases to U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi for discovery. The plaintiffs in the two tax-filing cases, Doe v. Meta (3:22-cv-07557) and Calderon v. Meta (5:22-cv-09149), opposed relating their cases to the Pixel healthcare litigation (see 2301110038). The tax filing and healthcare cases have in common Meta and its Pixel technology, but the Pixel, a code snippet, is customizable, said their opposition. Website developers choose which types of user actions to measure, then program the Pixel accordingly, it said. As a result, discovery in the healthcare and tax-filing litigation “will only partially overlap,” it said.