Wayfair LLC is facing continued legal exposure in California after a federal court allowed key privacy claims against the online home goods retailer to move forward.
The United States District Court for the Central District of California partially denied Wayfair’s motion to dismiss a putative class action filed under the California Invasion of Privacy Act, known as CIPA.
The case, Limas v. Wayfair LLC, was decided on August 13, 2026, and addresses how a decades-old wiretapping statute applies to modern website tracking technology.
The plaintiff alleged that Wayfair installed tracking tools on its website associated with TikTok, Facebook/Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter/X, and Reddit.
According to the First Amended Complaint, those tools collected information about users’ interactions with Wayfair’s website, including products viewed and purchased, search terms, and other website activity.
The court allowed claims under Section 631(a) of CIPA and a Section 638.51 trap-and-trace theory to survive, while dismissing the plaintiff’s separate pen register claim without leave to amend.
Wayfair argued that a trap-and-trace device captures incoming electronic or other impulses, while the trackers allegedly captured communications outgoing from users visiting the website.
The court also rejected Wayfair’s argument that a statutory exemption should apply, finding that the alleged purpose of the tracking tools did not fall within the exemptions Wayfair identified.
The FAC alleged that the tracking tools were used to improve product advertising, a purpose the court determined did not satisfy the statutory exemptions Wayfair sought to invoke.
Wayfair’s rule-of-lenity argument also failed, with the court finding no sufficiently specific statutory ambiguity to trigger that interpretive principle in this context.
The court further concluded that Wayfair had not identified a legally protected First Amendment interest in harvesting user data through third-party tracking tools.
The pen register claim under Section 638.51 was the one area where Wayfair secured a clear victory, obtaining dismissal of that specific theory without the plaintiff being granted leave to amend.
The decision in Limas is the latest in a growing line of website tracking cases to survive early dismissal challenges across federal courts.
For businesses deploying third-party tracking tools on consumer-facing websites, the ruling represents one more signal that CIPA litigation remains a serious and evolving legal risk.