If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Three Seattle parents went looking for answers about their children’s health and Meta was listening. When they typed symptoms and conditions into Seattle Children’s Hospital’s public website, a piece of tracking code recorded what they searched and handed it to Facebook’s parent company, according to a lawsuit now before the Washington Supreme Court. Some of those parents later saw Facebook ads tied to the exact symptoms they had researched. The lawsuit is all about the Meta Pixel, a snippet of code the hospital embedded on seattlechildrens.org. Pixel sits silently behind ordinary browsing and reports user activity back to Meta, which can link that activity to a person’s Facebook account through first- and third-party cookies. A parent logged into Facebook on the same device effectively attaches a name to the medical questions they thought they were asking a hospital in private. Carly Baker, Janssen Ramos Savoie, and Amber Shavies filed suit in October 2023, accusing the hospital of deploying Meta’s software to intercept and record sensitive health information without telling anyone. They argue the conduct breaks Washington’s Privacy Act, a 1967 wiretapping law that bars intercepting private communications without consent. On Thursday, their attorney took that argument to the state’s highest court, which heard the case at Peninsula College in Port Angeles as part of its traveling docket. “In the last decade or so, the corporate surveillance of our online activities has become increasingly invasive — this case is an example of that,” said Ryan Ellersick of Zimmerman Reed, who represents the parents. Seattle Children’s has won at every stage so far. A King County trial judge dismissed the complaint with prejudice and the Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the “click-and-search navigation” of a public website does not amount to the kind of private communication the wiretapping law was written to protect. The hospital’s lawyer, James Sigel, told the justices the statute targets eavesdropping between people and that searching a hospital website is no different from looking something up in an encyclopedia. Several justices pressed on how far the parents’ theory would reach. “In your view, does the privacy act protect all of my communications with Wikipedia if I searched gambling addiction or miscarriage or anything like that?” asked Justice Colleen Melody. The stakes reach well beyond three families. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and a coalition led by the US Chamber of Commerce have lined up behind the hospital, warning that treating routine web requests as wiretapping would expose the entire business of online ad measurement to legal risk. There’s a strong argument that the wiretapping law was never built for this. When Washington’s legislature wrote it in 1967, lawmakers were thinking about hidden microphones and tapped phone lines, not a script that logs which page a parent clicked. Stretching the idea of intercepting a private communication to cover a browser sending a request to a server asks a great deal of statutory language that predates the web by decades. Even sympathetic judges have struggled with where that theory stops, which is part of why Justice Melody reached for the Wikipedia comparison during argument. The parents are reaching for that law because almost nothing else is available to them. The United States still has no comprehensive privacy statute at the federal level. Two serious attempts, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act in 2022 and the American Privacy Rights Act in 2024, died before reaching a floor vote, and the SECURE Data Act introduced in April would preempt stronger state rules rather than build on them. What people are left with is a patchwork of older laws written for older problems. Washington has done more than most states. Its My Health My Data Act, passed in 2023, was written for exactly this category of health information and limits how companies can collect and share it. The protection came too late for these parents, whose searches were allegedly reaching Meta before the newer rules took hold and questions remain about how readily individuals can enforce it themselves. The wiretapping statute, for all its awkward fit, carries an explicit private right of action, which is part of why a 1967 law about eavesdropping ended up as the vehicle for a 2026 fight over ad trackers. The deeper problem is the one this predicament exposes. A company can build a tool that records what you search on a children’s hospital website and ships the result to an advertising giant. Whether that is even illegal turns on whether a court will agree to stretch a wiretapping law written before the personal computer existed. That uncertainty works in favor of whoever is doing the collecting. As long as the law stays this thin, the burden sits with individuals to dig up some old statute that might fit, while the tracking keeps running on the bet that no clear rule forbids it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. 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