Risk Intelligence
Insights
Risk intelligence on the website behaviors driving privacy, wiretapping, and accessibility litigation — CIPA, VPPA, COPPA, ADA, and the state privacy laws. Indicators that have appeared in real cases, not legal advice.
14 articles
The Milliseconds Before Consent: Why Tag Timing Has Become the Center of CIPA Litigation
The real exposure in 2026 website-wiretapping cases isn't whether a site uses trackers — it's when they fire relative to a visitor's choice.
Website Litigation Roundup: Q2 2026
Eight-figure pixel settlements, a hardening state-court line against pen-register claims, a live Supreme Court VPPA question, and a new front in the inbox. The quarter's developments and what shifted.
ADA Title III and California's Unruh Act, Explained: How Website Accessibility Became a Statutory-Damages Engine
The ADA carries no damages for private plaintiffs — yet website accessibility is the highest-volume web-litigation theory there is. The reason is a second statute, a state one, that supplies the money.
The VPPA's Second Act: Why a 1988 Video Law Now Turns on a String of Pixel Code
A statute written for VHS rental records has become one of the most active theories in website-tracking litigation — and the courts can't agree on who it protects or what counts as identifying.
Anatomy of a Health-Pixel Claim: From One Page Load to a $6.6 Million Settlement
A single advertising tag on a patient portal connects a person, a provider, and a condition — and that connection has driven settlements, FTC orders, and consolidated federal litigation. Here is the chain of events, request by request.
The 2025 COPPA Amendments: What Changed, Who It Reaches, and the April 2026 Compliance Deadline
The FTC's overhaul of the children's privacy rule expanded what counts as personal information and added a separate consent gate for advertising. The full compliance deadline has now passed.
The Pen-Register Split: Why the Same Tracker Survives in One California Court and Fails in Another
CIPA's trap-and-trace theory has produced opposite results blocks apart. A map of where the pixel-as-pen-register argument has lived and died — and what separates the rulings.
The State Privacy Patchwork in 2026: Opt-Out Rights, Global Privacy Control, and Where Website Enforcement Landed
Roughly twenty states now run comprehensive privacy laws, and the one requirement with the sharpest website teeth is the least visible: honoring a browser opt-out signal your site probably ignores.
Email Open-Tracking Pixels: How the Wiretap Theory Reached the Inbox
The invisible one-pixel image in a marketing email is the oldest tracker on the internet. Plaintiffs have begun applying the same website-wiretap framing to it — and the theory is genuinely unsettled.
What Session Replay Actually Records — and Why Courts Disagree About 'Interception'
Replay tools rebuild a frame-by-frame movie of a visitor's session from a stream of DOM mutations and input events. Understanding how that stream moves explains why wiretapping claims against them keep splitting.
The Ecommerce Risk Atlas: Where Privacy, Wiretapping, and Accessibility Claims Concentrate
Online retail sits at the intersection of nearly every active website-litigation theory. A map of where the claims cluster — and the concrete page behaviors behind each.
Consent That Actually Gates: Tag Governance Beyond the Banner
A consent banner is a user-interface element. Whether tags actually wait for consent is a plumbing question — and the two are decoupled far more often than teams realize.
CIPA, Explained: How a 1967 Wiretap Law Became the Engine of Website Litigation
A plain-English guide to the three CIPA sections plaintiffs use against websites — what each requires, how it maps to a page load, and where courts disagree.
The Defense Side: Arbitration, Standing, and the Party Exception
Most coverage of website-tracking litigation is written from the plaintiff's side. Here is the mirror image — the three defenses that most often end these cases before the merits, and what each depends on.