The court should deny Meta’s administrative motion to consider whether Doe v. Hey Favor (docket 3:22-cv-03580) should be related to the consolidated Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation (see 2303270047), said plaintiff Tuesday in an opposition filing in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. Meta’s March 24 motion to relate was conditioned on the court granting Meta’s motion to sever claims against it in Jane Doe. After failing to relate Doe v. Hey Favor to Doe v. GoodRx Holdings, Meta “now seeks to join the Favor Action with yet another unrelated proceeding” comprising 11 cases that deal expressly with hospital patient portals, said the opposition. The Hey Favor case “is not, and has never been” related to the hospital actions, it said. Doe v. Hey Favor seeks to represent a class that used Hey Favor’s mobile and web app that provides contraception and birth control. Jane Doe alleges Favor sends answers to personal information, such as answers to birth control questions and purchase history, through tracking tools, to Meta, TikTok, ByteDance and FullStory. The hospital actions, by contrast, represent users who were 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.

Slightly more than half (56%) of California Consumer Privacy Act lawsuits brought in 2022 “stemmed from data breaches involving the personal information of 100,000 or more people,” said Akin Gump’s "CCPA Litigation and Enforcement Report" Thursday. The number of CCPA cases filed in 2022 declined by about half from 2021, “but companies should not assume that consumer-driven CCPA litigation is cooling,” it said. It attributed the decrease to fewer individual complaints “brought against the same defendant for the same course of conduct.” There also were fewer complaints alleging a CCPA violation “without also alleging the requisite personal information security breach,” it said. That’s a signal consumers and practitioners “better understand the limitations of the private right of action,” it said. The proportion of CCPA claims stemming from something other than a data breach has “dropped dramatically,” accounting for only 5% of cases filed in 2022 compared with 30% in 2020, said the report. Though another year of CCPA litigation resulted in an increase in the number of judges who have handled a CCPA claim -- rising to 146 judges from 111 in 2021 -- the top five judges with the most CCPA claims remained unchanged, it said. “We continue to see California district court judges gaining the most experience handling CCPA claims,” said the report. In 2022, this trend extended to California state judges, it said.

U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo for Northern Illinois in Chicago set an April 19 deadline for plaintiff Gregory Roland to respond to defendant Chive Media Group’s motion to transfer Roland’s Video Privacy Protection Act putative class action to U.S. District Court for Western Texas in Austin (see 2303240008), said a clerk’s docket entry Monday (docket 1:23-cv-00337). Chive is headquartered in Austin. Its reply is due May 3, the entry said. Roland alleges Chive violated the VPPA by knowingly sharing his viewing data with Meta. Chive asserts Roland doesn’t claim “any tangible harm or concrete injuries” from its conduct, and he agreed to terms of service containing a valid forum-selection clause requiring all lawsuits to be filed in the Western District of Texas.

Plaintiff Ryan Segal voluntarily dismissed his Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act complaint against Google, said Segal’s notice Friday (docket 5:22-cv-06398) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose. Segal’s complaint alleged Google, through Google Assistant, surreptitiously collects, uses and stores voiceprints of each individual who speaks to an enabled device (see 2211070004).

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered consolidation of 15 data privacy actions against Apple, in a Friday filing (docket 5:22-cv-07069) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose. When a pleading isn't intended to apply to all actions, it will be docketed on the master docket with a notation in the docket text as to the case numbers to which it pertains, said the order. Except for the April 20 status conference statement deadline, the April 27 status conference and the June 1 hearing on the motion for appointment as interim class counsel, all other case deadlines in related actions are vacated, Davila said.

Meta should be removed from plaintiff “Jane Doe’s” privacy class action involving its Pixel tracking tool because the allegations and claims in the case “are fully covered by and subsumed within” claims asserted in the consolidated Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation (docket 3:22-cv-03580), said the company’s motion to sever claims (docket 3:23-cv-00059) Thursday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. Plaintiff alleges Hey Favor sent users’ health and prescription information to Meta via the tech company’s Pixel software code so it could measure users’ online health activities. Consolidating Jane Doe’s case with the consolidated action would conserve resources and avoid conflicting results to relate and consolidate Doe’s claims against Meta with the consolidated healthcare action, it said. On Friday, Meta filed a conditional joint administrative motion to consider whether the claims against it in Jane Doe v. Hey Favor, filed in January in the same district, should be related to the consolidated action. The Friday motion is conditioned on the court granting Meta's motion to sever claims against it in Jane Doe.

Hernando County, Florida, plaintiff Gloria Talley voluntarily dismissed her Video Privacy Protection Act claims against iHeartMedia without prejudice, said her notice Wednesday (docket 8:23-cv-00215) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Tampa. Talley’s Feb. 1 class action identified iHeartMedia as a videotape service provider under the scope of the VPPA, which prohibits it from knowingly disclosing consumers’ personally identifiable information and viewing history without their “express consent” (see 2302020016).

An in-person discovery conference is set for April 13 at 2 p.m. in plaintiff Jazmine Harris’ Video Privacy Protection Act complaint against PBS, said an order signed Wednesday (docket 1:22-cv-02456) by U.S. District Judge Michael Brown for Northern Georgia in Atlanta. Brown denied the PBS motion to dismiss Harris’ class action Monday because he was obligated to read her complaint “in the light most favorable” to her (see 2303210016), said his order. But Brown recognized that discovery was needed “to answer several threshold factual questions” to determine whether PBS’ use of the Facebook pixel tracking tool violated the VPPA, it said. “At minimum,” those facts “might control dispositive issues” about whether Harris is a consumer as defined under the VPPA, and whether PBS disclosed her personally identifiable information and did so knowingly, it said. The conference will address “how discovery should proceed, including whether the parties should first focus on these potentially decisive issues,” said the order. The parties should be prepared to discuss “the appropriate scope of discovery,” whether discovery should be “segmented into phases,” and how the court can ensure that discovery “occurs as efficiently as possible,” it said. His order stayed discovery until after the hearing is over.

Conspiring with a private company to “hijack” residents’ smartphones by installing a contact-tracing app on their devices without the owners’ knowledge or consent isn’t a tool the Massachusetts Department of Public Health “may lawfully employ in its efforts to combat COVID-19,” alleged six Android users. The users, including Robert Wright, a senior faculty fellow at the American Institute of Economic Research, filed an amended complaint Monday against the department and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) in U.S. District Court for Massachusetts in Springfield. The defendants’ “brazen disregard” for civil liberties violates the Constitution, “and it must stop now,” it said. A month earlier, the state moved to dismiss the original Nov. 14 lawsuit for failure to state a claim (see 2211250008). To increase the app’s adoption, the state started working with Google in June 2021 to secretly install it on more than a million Android smartphones, it said. When owners discovered and deleted the app, the state would reinstall it on their phones, it said. Even if a user doesn’t opt into the department’s COVID-19 notification system, the app “still causes the mobile device to broadcast and receive Bluetooth signals,” it said. “In sum,” the department installed “spyware” that deliberately tracks and records movement and personal contacts for more than a million smartphones “without their owners’ permission and awareness,” it said. The spyware still resides “on the overwhelming majority of the devices on which it was installed,” it said. At least two dozen other states developed COVID-19 contact-tracing apps using Google’s application programming interface, said the complaint. Most engaged in community outreach, “encouraging their residents to download the apps and voluntarily opt in for contact tracing,” it said. Massachusetts appears to be the only state to “surreptitiously embed” the app on mobile devices, it said.

Plaintiff Melanie Tado and TikTok parent ByteDance submitted a motion (1:23-cv-01430) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago Monday to stay all proceedings and deadlines in their action, pending resolution of similar proceedings before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation that could affect the venue in which their case will proceed. Cook County, Illinois, plaintiff Tado alleged in a complaint this month that TikTok violated the Federal Wire Tap Act, intercepting her communications when she used its in-app browser to communicate with third-party websites (see 2303080049) by using JavaScript code it inserted to record every mouse movement, click, keystroke, URL visited and other electronic communication. Also this month, defendants filed a notice of Tado as a potential tag-along action to an existing MDL proceeding (MDL No. 2948) in the same district, currently pending before Chief Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. TikTok and ByteDance have similar notices in 16 related cases in U.S. courts. In addition to the pending proceedings in MDL No. 2948, a plaintiff in Recht v. TikTok (docket 2:22-cv-08613) filed a motion in December to consolidate that action and other related cases into a new MDL in the U.S. Central District of California, the motion said.