Jason Swarts v. The Home Depot, Inc.

Published by Crandall Consulting · Informational litigation intelligence · Last substantive update: October 12, 2026

Docket / citation: 23-cv-0995-JST

Summary

Swarts brought a putative class action alleging that Home Depot recorded website chat conversations without his knowledge or consent, asserting CIPA, federal Wiretap Act, and UCL claims. The order grants in part and denies in part Home Depot’s motion to dismiss, and the excerpt expressly concludes that Swarts fails to state a CIPA § 632 claim.

Litigation Status

Status, direction, and weight describe how tracked public sources characterize this matter as of our last review — they are informational classifications, not legal assessments.

Procedural Posture

A putative class action filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court was removed to federal court on March 3, 2023. Swarts filed an amended complaint on April 25, 2023, and Home Depot moved to dismiss under Rules 12(b)(2) and 12(b)(6).

Reported Holding

The order grants in part and denies in part Home Depot’s motion to dismiss. The court concludes that Swarts fails to state a claim under CIPA § 632, reasoning that the provision applies to telephone rather than internet communications and rejecting the asserted expectation of confidentiality for customer-service chats.

What the Court Decided

The court partially grants and partially denies the motion to dismiss and concludes that Swarts fails to state a § 632 claim. The bounded excerpt does not establish the disposition of the other individual claims or the personal-jurisdiction challenge.

Significance

Neutral / mixed significance. 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 customer-service chat
• chat recording

Statutes Invoked

• California Invasion of Privacy Act, Cal. Penal Code §§ 631, 632; Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510 et seq.; California Unfair Competition Law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200 et seq.

Claims Asserted

Claims identified in tracked public sources; pleadings may include additional or amended claims.

• California Invasion of Privacy Act, Cal. Penal Code §§ 631, 632
• Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510 et seq.
• California Unfair Competition Law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200 et seq.

What This Matter May Mean for Website Operators

For operators using similar technologies, the recurring factual questions in matters like this one are when session recording begins relative to consent and whether input masking covers every field; whether chat transcripts or typing previews transit a vendor's servers before the visitor presses send. Our scanner tests these behaviors empirically.

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

• Swarts v. Home Depot — Order Granting Motion to Dismiss — U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (via GovInfo) · Tier A (Primary authority) · 2023-08-30

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.

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