Washington’s Supreme Court rejected a claim that Seattle Children’s Hospital violated the Washington Privacy Act by using pixels to track activity on its public website. In its October 8, 2026 decision in Baker v. Seattle Children’s Hospital, the court held that the website clicks and searches tracked by the pixel did not involve communications “between two or more individuals” as defined by the law. Instead, each website visitor interacted with an automated system, not another individual.
The proposed class action was brought by a group of parents that alleged they searched the hospital’s website for information about their children’s medical conditions, health care providers, and clinic hours. They said the site’s pixels recorded their clicks, searches, and page views and sent the information to the third party who had placed those pixels for targeted advertising. Because the case involved a motion to dismiss, the court accepted the complaint’s factual allegations as true. It did not decide whether the parents had proved them.
The provision at issue, RCW 9.73.030(1)(a), generally prohibits intercepting or recording private communications transmitted by a covered device between two or more individuals without all participants’ consent. The majority distinguished between who can violate the law and whose communications it protects. The statute separately lists individuals, corporations, and other entities as potential violators. But the provision governing the communications at issue uses the narrower term “individuals.”
The court concluded that the parents’ clicks and searches generated automated responses from a hospital-operated server. Those exchanges involved only one individual each, so the claim failed. The court affirmed dismissal without deciding whether the searches and clicks qualified as private communications.
One judge, in a concurring opinion, agreed with the dismissal because the parents had not sufficiently pled that their private communications were between two or more individuals, but had sufficiently pled that the communications were private communications. And, that those private communications were protected by the state’s privacy act.
Putting it Into Practice. This decision is welcome news for companies facing Washington Privacy Act claims concerning pixels that track automated interactions on public websites. However, the decision does not establish that website tracking is lawful generally. The court did not address the sufficiency of the plaintiffs’ other claims, and its review was limited to activity on the hospital’s public website, not communications inside the patient portal. Given the narrow nature of this ruling, it leaves open the potential for future litigation in the pixel space.