In Re Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation
- William Orrick
- 3:22-cv-03580
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 4
In re Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation: Judge DeMarchi ordered plaintiffs to produce certain broad-distribution emails and run Meta’s proposed searches.
The plaintiffs in the consolidated litigation and Meta. Plaintiffs must review and produce specified emails, run additional searches, and confer with Meta about the burden of reviewing additional documents.
What happened
In re Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation concerns Meta’s request for emails showing whether plaintiffs disclosed information about their doctors, medical conditions, or treatments to broad groups of non-Meta recipients.
Meta said the emails could bear on whether plaintiffs expected the information to remain private, whether the alleged intrusion was serious enough to support their claims, whether the named plaintiffs were injured, and issues involving standing and class certification. Plaintiffs argued that Meta delayed raising the dispute and that private communications did not show whether they reasonably expected communications with healthcare providers to remain private.
Judge DeMarchi ordered plaintiffs to produce responsive emails sent to listservs or more than 50 recipients, and to run Meta’s proposed search terms across their entire email collections. The parties also had to confer about the burden of reviewing any additional documents and report to the court by January 10, 2025.
The detailed version
- In Re Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation · No. 3:22-cv-03580
- William Orrick
- Dec. 20, 2024
Background
This order resolves a discovery dispute concerning Meta’s request for emails reflecting plaintiffs’ disclosures to non-Meta recipients of information about their doctors, medical conditions, or treatments. The plaintiffs allege that they expected their communications with healthcare providers to remain confidential and private, including communications about providers, specialists, conditions, and treatments.
Meta argued that emails showing broad disclosure of allegedly sensitive health information could be relevant to whether plaintiffs considered the information confidential, whether they had a reasonable expectation that it would remain private, whether the alleged intrusion was sufficiently serious to support their claims, whether the named plaintiffs were injured by Meta’s use of the Pixel, and issues involving standing and class certification.
Parties’ Positions
Plaintiffs argued that Meta had forfeited the discovery request by waiting to raise it. They also argued that the requested emails were not relevant because private communications about sensitive health information did not bear on the reasonableness of plaintiffs’ expectations of privacy concerning their communications with healthcare providers.
The court agreed that private communications disclosing sensitive health information to friends, family, healthcare providers, or support groups would not show that plaintiffs expected their healthcare-provider communications to be disclosed to Meta or to unrelated third parties. But the court understood Meta to be seeking communications showing broad disclosure, such as emails sent to listservs or to more than 50 recipients.
Court’s Analysis
The court held that emails showing broad disclosure could provide information about the social norms relevant to deciding whether an expectation of privacy was reasonable and whether the alleged intrusion was sufficiently serious. The court therefore found that this discovery was relevant to a claim or defense. The court also declined to find that Meta had waived or forfeited the request based on the timing of the discovery dispute.
The court noted that it was unclear whether plaintiffs agreed that Meta’s proposed searches would effectively identify communications disclosing sensitive health information to broad groups. Plaintiffs objected that new searches would burden them and interfere with the schedule, but they did not state whether they had already reviewed emails identified by their existing searches for the communications Meta sought.
Order
The court ordered plaintiffs to:
- Produce emails sent to listservs or to more than 50 recipients that disclose the types or categories of sensitive health information plaintiffs contend they provided to healthcare providers and that was likely disclosed to Meta through the Pixel. Plaintiffs had to review the emails identified by their existing search terms and promptly produce responsive documents to Meta.
- Run Meta’s proposed new search term or terms against their entire email collection and report the number of unique documents identified by those searches that were not already identified by existing searches.
- Confer with Meta about the burden of reviewing the additional documents and whether that burden could be reduced, then report the status of the dispute to the court by January 10, 2025.
The order addressed discovery only; it did not decide the ultimate merits of the plaintiffs’ claims.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.