The Washington Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of a Washington privacy act claim over Seattle Children’s Hospital’s use of Meta Pixel on its public website, and it did so on a definition, not on privacy: a click or site search answered by an automated server is not a communication “between two or more individuals.” Seven justices signed the majority opinion, two concurred in the result only, and nobody dissented. Read it as one statute’s theory removed for automated website responses in one state, nothing wider.
What did the Washington Supreme Court decide about Meta Pixel?
In Baker v. Seattle Children’s Hospital (No. 104590-5, filed October 8), the court held that the Washington privacy act “does not prohibit SCH’s alleged actions” because the statute “excludes searches and clicks that generate an automated response from SCH’s website.” It did not rule the Pixel lawful or the data not private; the Meta Pixel privacy act claim failed on the statute’s wording about who was communicating.
Why a fully automated system defeated the claim
The case reached the court on a motion to dismiss, so everything about the tracking is the plaintiffs’ allegation, not a finding. The complaint alleged that the hospital used Meta technology to track visitors’ searches and clicks and the site’s automated responses, shared that data with Meta, and that Meta used it for targeted advertising. In the opinion’s example, a visitor who types “depression” into the search bar gets a resources page, and the Pixel allegedly relays that search to Meta. Meta is not a party.
The majority, written by Justice Angelis, turned on the statute’s wording. The act lists “individual[s]” separately from “partnership[s], corporation[s], association[s], or the state of Washington.” Because “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,” the majority concluded that “only one individual was involved in each communication.”
The Court of Appeals had affirmed on a different ground: the searches were not “private communication[s]” because the complaint described them as unilateral, not a “back-and-forth” exchange with another party. The Supreme Court affirmed on the “two or more individuals” wording instead. The Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the Washington State Hospital Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau filed amicus briefs in support of the hospital.
The plaintiffs had pointed to decisions letting similar claims proceed under the federal wiretap act and California’s privacy act. The majority called federal cases “not instructive given the significant differences between the state and federal statutory schemes” and said the same of California’s law. That reasoning cuts both ways, and the second half is our reading: a defendant elsewhere should not expect this ruling to carry over either.
What the court did not decide
| Decided | Left open |
|---|---|
| Searches and clicks answered by an automated system are not communication between two or more individuals | Whether the communications were “private” |
| Dismissal of the privacy act claim is affirmed | Whether the cookie pop-up amounted to consent |
| Review covers the public website | The patient portal and the other claims |
The majority wrote that it does “not decide whether any communications at issue constitute a ‘private communication.’” The complaint also pleaded claims under the Consumer Protection Act and the Uniform Health Care Information Act, plus invasion of privacy, breach of implied contract, conversion and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs did not raise those on appeal, and the court says its opinion “does not address the sufficiency of those claims.”
The cookie notice was alleged to tell visitors that accepting cookies meant agreeing to software that stores data to assist marketing, without naming the Pixel. The majority never tested that notice as consent. PPC Land also reported the ruling.
What the two concurring justices said
Justice González, joined by Justice Whitener, agreed with the result and wrote separately. This is the view of two justices, not the holding. In González’s words, “the parents transmitted private communications on the hospital’s website, but they directed those communications to a server that returned stored content and not to another individual.” The two would have held that the clicking and searching “could constitute a private communication,” and on the banner the concurrence says that whether it defeated the parents’ expectation “is not resolved by the pleadings.”
Near its end, the concurrence marks the boundary: “A message to a member of a care team is not before us, nor is the application of our privacy act to a system that does more than return stored content.” The majority’s footnote 6 likewise says the court “need not, and do not, resolve” whether the statute would apply when the listed entities communicate through individuals.
What to check
This part is elsop’s reading, not the court’s instruction. The ruling concerns one Washington statute and searches and clicks that an automated system answers. Neither opinion decides what happens when a person is on the other end. The two concurring justices also set aside “a system that does more than return stored content”; the majority draws no such line and speaks only of “a fully automated system.” So it is worth sorting which of a site’s pages only return an automated response and which pass what a visitor types to a person. Consent, privacy and the other claims were not decided.
What Meta does with Pixel data is a separate question; we covered its move to use off-site Pixel signals for feed and AI personalization, and the opinion describes only targeted advertising. Nor is this the kind of case Meta faced in the New Mexico trial, where Meta itself was the defendant, under another state’s consumer protection law, before a jury.
