Nonparty's Submission Supporting Meta's Motion to Sever 'Adds Nothing New,' Says Doe

Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation plaintiffs’ submission in support of Meta’s motion to sever claims against it in the Doe v. Hey Favor privacy lawsuit “adds nothing new” and “merely reiterates arguments” Meta previously made or the "hospital action" plaintiffs have made in their effort to relate Doe's claims to the Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation class action in the event severance is granted, said plaintiff Jane Doe’s response brief (docket 3:23-cv-00059) Monday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco.

“It remains the case that Meta’s motion should be denied,” said Doe, saying the court indicated at a May 16 case management conference its intent to deny Meta’s motion to sever her claims. Hey Favor filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy April 18, and that filing triggered an automatic stay of Doe’s case under the bankruptcy code (see 2304280021). Claims asserted in Hey Favor “have nothing to do with hospital websites, patient portals, or scheduling pages,” but instead involve the interception of “different data, about different people, through different technologies,” and they “should proceed on their own,” Doe said.

Doe's lawsuit seeks to represent a class that used Hey Favor’s mobile and web app that provided contraception and birth control. Doe alleges Hey Favor, using tracking tools, sent her responses to personal information, such as answers to birth control questions and purchase history to Meta, TikTok, ByteDance and FullStory to sell advertising. Plaintiffs in the hospital actions claim their data was collected exclusively through web-based patient portals that incorporated a single technology -- the Meta Pixel -- "which is not present (and cannot be used) on the mobile version of the Favor App," Doe said.

The Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation hospital action represents hospital patients who allegedly used passive patient portals on hospital websites. Meta argued in its motion to sever claims that the allegations and claims in Hey Favor were “fully covered and subsumed within” Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation.

Hey Favor, a platform for buying birth control and contraceptives that users primarily interact with through a mobile application under the name The Pill Club, didn't incorporate the Meta Pixel, "because it cannot," said Doe. The Hey Favor mobile application incorporates the code from Meta’s software development kit (SDK), along with SDKs and other analytics tools from social media platforms TikTok and FullStory, "which by design cannot be incorporated on websites, and transmits app event data that is different from and not collected by the Meta Pixel," she said.

The court should also deny the request hospital action plaintiffs “sneak in at the end of their brief" for a standing order that would automatically sever and transfer "any future claims" against Meta asserted in other actions filed after Feb. 21 that overlap with the claims asserted in that action, said Doe. The “breathtaking overreach” is consistent with their efforts to expand the scope of their case since Doe initiated her action, she said. The proposed order “exceeds the limited scope of the response they requested” at the case management conference and “contradicts the severance analysis, which is highly case specific," she said.