Recent Insights on Website Tracking Litigation
If 2025 was the year website-tracking claims became impossible to ignore, 2026 is the year those cases began to mature. Courts are looking beyond whether a pixel, cookie, chat tool, or session-replay script was present on a site. Instead, they are focusing more closely on what data was collected, when it was collected, what disclosures users saw, whether consent was meaningful, and whether individualized browsing activity can support class treatment. At the same time, appellate activity in video privacy cases is keeping pressure on publishers and other businesses that embed video content alongside common tracking tools. One insight this year comes from a publisher case in the New York federal court, where the court allowed tracking claims to proceed past the pleading stage. The allegations were familiar ones: a website allegedly shared visitor information with outside advertising or analytics partners through embedded code, without meaningful consent. What made the ruling notable was...