Doe v. Children's Hospital Corporation
Summary
Plaintiff alleged disclosure of website searches, appointment requests, and patient-portal clicks to Google and Facebook without consent. The court found the claims sufficiently pleaded and denied dismissal, without determining liability.
Litigation Status
Procedural Posture
Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss the second amended complaint in a putative class action.
Reported Holding
The ECPA and six state-law claims survived dismissal.
What the Court Decided
The allegations plausibly supported the ECPA crime-tort exception; the court denied the hospital's motion.
What the Court Did Not Decide
Actual liability or the hospital's motivation, which remained a factual question.
Significance
Generally viewed as plaintiff-favorable. Characterizations of significance describe how the matter has generally been discussed in tracked public sources; individual holdings are often narrow, procedural, or fact-specific, and this page does not state or imply broader holdings than the sources support.
What This Page Does and Does Not Say
This page reports what our tracked public sources say about this matter — including, where identified, the procedural posture (for example, a ruling on a motion to dismiss is not a final merits decision). It does not report legal conclusions beyond those sources, does not predict outcomes, and does not constitute legal advice.
Technologies at Issue
- website tracking technologies
- online patient portal tracking
- targeted advertising
- Website tracking technologies
Third parties named or identified in tracked sources: Google, Facebook (Meta), Facebook.
Statutes Invoked
- 18 U.S.C. § 2511; Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 214, § 1B
- Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2511; Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 214, § 1B
Claims Asserted
- Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 U.S.C. § 2511) - interception claim
- Massachusetts statutory right to privacy (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 214, § 1B)
- breach of fiduciary duty
- negligence
- breach of confidence
- breach of contract
- unjust enrichment
- ECPA interception
- Massachusetts statutory privacy
- Breach of fiduciary duty
- Negligence
- Breach of confidence
- Breach of contract
- Unjust enrichment
What This Matter May Mean for Website Operators
Because this matter is pending, anything reported here is procedural — allegations and interim rulings, not final determinations.
Detection of a similar technology on a website is an informational risk indicator, not a legal conclusion, and nothing in this section is legal advice.
Related Intelligence
Sources
- Doe v. Children's Hospital Corporation — ORDER on Motion to Dismiss (District of Massachusetts)
- Doe v. Children's Hospital Corporation — Order on Website-Tracking ECPA and State-Law Claims
About This Page
Publisher: Inspection-Ready Institute, Inc. (DBA Crandall Consulting), an independent website compliance and risk consultancy. We are not a law firm and nothing on this page is legal advice.
How this content is produced: Facts are extracted from publicly available sources — court and government materials, recognized legal press, professional analysis, and industry reports — by our litigation intelligence engine, stored with full source provenance, and rendered from the database. Risk guidelines are computed by a deterministic formula, never by an AI model directly. See the full methodology.
Limitations: Counts labeled "Tracked" reflect matters identified in our source set and are not official court statistics. We report what courts decided and did not decide; we do not predict outcomes.
Corrections: If you believe anything on this page is inaccurate, contact us via the contact page and we will review the underlying sources promptly.
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