A federal judge has dismissed a class action lawsuit that accused UnitedHealthcare of illegally installing third-party tracking software on its website to collect visitor data without consent.
The case, originally filed in October 2025, was brought by a California resident who said she visited uhc.com to browse health plans, left without buying anything, and then received targeted ads afterward on other websites and social media. She alleged that tracking software from Google, Microsoft, Meta and Adobe had been automatically installed on her browser during the uhc.com visit, which was then used to surveil her activity across the internet.
The complaint alleged violations of California data and privacy laws, along with federal wiretapping regulations, and was filed on behalf of a nationwide class as well as a California subclass.
On March 31, U.S. District Judge William Shubb granted UnitedHealthcare’s motion to dismiss, finding the plaintiff had not shown she was harmed by the data collection. The court also held that the browsing data was collected during a single visit to a public website by someone who submitted no forms and provided no personal information, which it compared to a store employee watching shoppers versus invasive and wide-ranging data collection that violates privacy laws.
The ruling arrives amid years of pixel tracking litigation across the healthcare industry, with dozens of health systems and insurers previously facing lawsuits alleging that third-party tracking tools on their websites and patient portals sent patient information to large tech companies like Meta and Google. In 2023, Advocate Aurora Health agreed to pay $12.3 million after lawsuits over pixel tracking technology placed on its website and patient portals, and Froedtert Health reached a $2 million settlement in a patient-led lawsuit accusing it of sharing patient data from MyChart with Meta.
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