Amended Complaint Charges Tesla in Unlawful Use of Tracking Pixels
An amended complaint filed Thursday in federal court said Tesla uses tracking technologies on its website without the knowledge or consent of users, in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).
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The car company “surreptitiously installs and operates tracking software on the Website without providing users with adequate notice or obtaining their informed consent,” the amended suit said. Tesla uses the data it collects to accomplish “commercial objectives, including identity resolution, targeted advertising, and the monetization of consumer data.”
Plaintiff Peter Dawidzik claimed Tesla collects detailed user information like IP addresses, pages visited, mouse movements and even geolocation based on IP from the trackers, which the company and third parties such as Twitter and Google then use for marketing.
But Dawidzik and other class members “did not consent to the installation, execution, embedding, or injection of the Trackers on their devices and did not expect their behavioral data to be disclosed or monetized in this way,” and so Tesla’s actions violate CIPA, said the complaint.
Case 5:25-cv-01982 was filed in the U.S. District Court for Central California in July (see 2508010042). Tesla has asked the district court to drop the case, alleging the plaintiff failed to show he suffered an injury, plausibly state a claim or prove jurisdiction to bring the case (see 2510060034).
In a text-only order on the docket Friday, Judge Kenly Kiya Kato dropped Tesla's motion to dismiss and ordered the company to respond to the amended complaint.