Okash v. Essentia Health

Background

Michael Okash sued Essentia Health individually and on behalf of a proposed class. He alleged that Essentia used Meta Pixel, a tracking tool, on essentiahealth.org. According to the complaint, the tool sent Meta information about users’ activity, including pages visited, searches, clicks, and other submissions. Okash alleged that this information could be associated with users’ Facebook accounts and used for targeted advertising.

Okash had initially included allegations concerning Essentia’s MyChart patient portal, but he removed those allegations in his amended complaint because Essentia did not use Meta Pixel on MyChart. The court distinguished between information generated by a user’s activity on the public website—such as searches for doctors or treatments—and personalized information from two-way communications through MyChart, such as appointments, medical records, and messages. The court treated the latter allegations as implausible because the complaint did not show that such information appeared on the public website.

Essentia’s privacy policy disclosed that it might use Facebook Pixel to understand how users interacted with the website after clicking through from a Facebook advertisement. The court found that Okash plausibly alleged that Essentia used the Pixel continuously, including when users reached the website by other means, so the policy did not disclose the full extent of the alleged tracking. The court also declined to assume at the motion-to-dismiss stage that the browsewrap privacy policy formed a valid contract.

Claims Dismissed

The court dismissed Okash’s claims under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Minnesota’s wiretap statute. It held that Essentia was a party to the communications and therefore fell within the statute’s party exception. The court also held that Okash did not plead facts showing that the alleged interception was undertaken to commit an independent criminal or tortious act, as required for the exception’s crime-or-tort limitation. Because the complaint did not allege an unlawful interception, the related use and disclosure theories also failed. These claims were dismissed without prejudice.

The court dismissed the Minnesota Health Records Act claim without prejudice. Although the statute broadly covers information relating to a patient’s health, care, or payment for care, Okash did not provide enough specific examples of the doctors, conditions, searches, or time periods involved to plausibly show that health records were transmitted.

The court dismissed the intrusion-upon-seclusion claim without prejudice because it found no intrusion. In its view, Okash voluntarily provided the website information to Essentia, and the alleged later transmission through Meta Pixel did not constitute an affirmative act by Essentia to obtain information from his private affairs.

The court also stated that Okash had abandoned his claim under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(3), and the order dismissed Count III with prejudice.

Claims Allowed to Proceed

The court denied dismissal of the Minnesota Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act claim. Okash identified alleged misrepresentations and omissions in Essentia’s policies, including the allegation that Essentia’s actual Pixel use exceeded what its privacy policy disclosed. The court also found that the complaint adequately alleged a risk of future harm supporting a request for injunctive relief and satisfied the heightened pleading requirement for fraud-based allegations.

The court denied dismissal of the Minnesota Consumer Fraud Act claim. It found a plausible public benefit because the proposed class action alleged broad misrepresentations to the public and could have compensatory and deterrent effects, even though the complaint sought monetary damages. The court found the pleading arguments about this claim substantially overlapped with the arguments it had rejected for the deceptive-trade-practices claim.

The court allowed the unjust-enrichment claim to proceed. It was premature to decide that the privacy policy was a governing contract. The court also accepted as true Okash’s allegation that Essentia received monetary compensation for his data, even though the complaint provided few additional details.

Disposition

Judge John R. Tunheim granted in part and denied in part Essentia’s motion to dismiss. The order dismissed Counts I, II, V, and VI without prejudice and dismissed Count III with prejudice. The claims in Counts IV, VII, and VIII were not dismissed and were allowed to proceed.