The CIPA lull is a maintenance window

A judge threw out most of a website-tracking lawsuit on October 20, 2026, and the reflex in some quarters will be to turn the pixels back on. That reflex is a mistake. The ruling narrows one route to a lawsuit and leaves several others open, and for healthcare organizations it touches none of the rules that actually govern their tracking risk. The right response is to treat the quiet as a maintenance window and clean up the tags, not to strip out the consent tools that keep you out of the next case.

What SB 690 changed, and what it left standing

In Evans v. MH Sub I, LLC, a suit against the operator of FindLaw, Judge Chhabria of the Northern District of California dismissed the pen-register, wiretap, federal Wiretap Act, CDAFA, and UCL claims. The pen-register claim fell to California's SB 690, which the state signed this month and which the court applied to the pending case. What matters is what SB 690 did not do. It did not erase pen-register liability for website tracking. It moved enforcement to the California Attorney General. The private plaintiffs' bar lost one door; the building still stands, and a state regulator now holds a key to it.

Why the wiretap claim failed

The wiretap count was dismissed because the plaintiff never alleged that the trackers read his communications while they were in transit. That is a fact-specific result, not a safe harbor. Section 631 wiretap theories remain available to a plaintiff who pleads the in-transit element, and the California constitutional privacy claim in this same case was dismissed with leave to replead within fourteen days. A dismissal that invites a do-over is not a win anyone should build a tracking strategy on.

Healthcare sits on a different track entirely

None of this reaches the rules most of our healthcare clients actually answer to. HIPAA's guidance on tracking technologies, the Office for Civil Rights' enforcement posture, the FTC's view of health-data sharing, and state health-privacy statutes do not depend on CIPA and are untouched by SB 690. An organization that reads a California CIPA dismissal as permission to loosen its tracking on patient-facing pages is answering the wrong question. The exposure that carries real enforcement weight in healthcare was never the one that just got narrowed.

Use the window: audit what fires before consent

The productive move this quarter is a pre-consent firing audit. Load each key page with tooling that records every network request before any consent is given, and for each tag that fires, write down what it is and the legitimate purpose it serves. Anything nobody can explain comes out. The output is a short, defensible record of what runs, when it runs, and why, which is exactly what counsel wants in hand if a demand letter arrives.

Consent architecture that holds up in any state

A tracking setup that survives the next legal theory rather than the last one shares a few traits. It honors the Global Privacy Control signal so an opt-out is respected without a user hunting for a setting. It uses server-side tagging with real controls over what leaves the browser and when. It rests on vendor contracts that actually cover the data being shared. Built that way, the configuration does not need a favorable ruling in a given state to be sound.

A checklist worth handing to counsel

Quarter by quarter, the same short list keeps an organization out of the test-case pool: confirm what fires before consent, document a purpose for every tag, verify GPC is honored, check that vendor agreements match the data flows, and remove anything unexplained. The organizations that strip out their consent work during this lull are the ones volunteering to become the precedent for 2027's arguments. The ones that keep their proof current stay boring, and boring is the goal.

We run live, forensic privacy audits that capture what a site actually fires before and after consent, measured against CIPA, GDPR, and CCPA. The point of the work is the same in a quiet quarter as a loud one: know what your site does before someone else tells you.

Sources: National Law Review, SB 690 in action: N.D. Cal. dismisses CIPA pen-register claim; Covington Inside Privacy, California governor signs SB 690; WilmerHale, CIPA reform signed into law.