Many businesses are being hit with demand letters and lawsuits challenging their use of website marketing tools, such as pixels, under a lesser-known provision of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”) prohibiting the use of “trap and trace devices.”  A California court recently added clarity to the meaning of this term: a pixel tool that captures the “contents” of a plaintiff’s website communications is “definitionally not a trap and trace device.”  Price v. Headspace, 2025 WL 1237977 (Cal. Sup. Ct. Apr. 1, 2025).

Plaintiff Carole Price brought a lawsuit against Defendant Headspace, which allegedly used a pixel “on virtually every page of [its] website” to capture “numbers, emails, routing addresses, and other signaling information of website visitors.”  Importantly, the plaintiff also alleged that the pixel captured “images of website user’s interest in Defendant’s services” to later send targeted marketing, and even included “screenshot images” in her complaint “discussing the capture of said images.”  Plaintiff asserted that the pixel constituted a “trap and trace device,” which Headspace was liable for allegedly using in violation of CIPA section 638.51—also known as the “trap and trace device” or “pen register” provision of CIPA.

The Court sustained Headspace’s demurrer, concluding that the website pixel tool is “not a trap and trace device.”  CIPA defines a “trap and trace device” as a device that collects “dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information,” “but not the contents of a communication.”  Put differently, trap and trace devices are “designed to capture information about the communication,” such as the “who, when, and where of communications,” but not the content of the communication itself.”  According to the Court, “there is no liberal construction of [the pixel] sending ‘images’ that does not amount to capturing the contents of the communication.”  Thus, even though the website pixel collected some non-contents information, the Court held that the pixel’s alleged collection of contents meant that, “by definition,” the pixel is “not a trap and trace device.”