KRISTIN COBBS; LYNNE KAWAMINAMI; LORETTA SCHWEINSBURG v. PETMED EXPRESS, INC.

Published by Crandall Consulting · Informational litigation intelligence · Last substantive update: August 23, 2026

Docket / citation: 25-80458-CIV-CANNON

Summary

The Southern District of Florida denied in part and granted in part PetMed Express’s motion to dismiss. The court found plaintiffs had Article III standing and allowed claims under the federal ECPA and California Penal Code §§ 631 and 632 to proceed, but dismissed plaintiffs’ CDAFA claim (Cal. Penal Code § 502) and common-law intrusion claim with prejudice. Consent and other factual issues were left for later stages of the case.

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

Plaintiffs filed a First Amended Complaint (filed April 2025 per the opinion). Defendant moved to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6); the court issued an order on January 14, 2026 resolving the motion as described.

Reported Holding

The district court held that plaintiffs have Article III standing and that their ECPA (18 U.S.C. § 2511) and CIPA (Cal. Penal Code §§ 631 and 632) claims plausibly state claims at the Rule 12(b)(6) stage, while plaintiffs failed to plead a cognizable damage or loss under the California CDAFA (Cal. Penal Code § 502) and failed to state a common-law intrusion-upon-seclusion claim. The court also found the consent/notice issue not resolvable on the pleadings.

What the Court Decided

The court granted in part and denied in part defendant PetMed Express’s motion to dismiss: Counts I (ECPA), II (CIPA §631), and III (CIPA §632) may proceed; Counts IV (CDAFA §502) and V (intrusion upon seclusion) are dismissed with prejudice. The court ordered defendant to answer the First Amended Complaint by February 4, 2026.

What the Court Did Not Decide

The court did not resolve the factual merits of the ECPA or CIPA claims, the applicability of the ECPA "crime-tort" exception in fact, or whether plaintiffs actually consented to the data transmissions; those issues remain for discovery/summary judgment or trial.

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

• Meta Pixel
• third-party tracking scripts
• cookies
• form-input capture
• third-party analytics tracking

Third parties named or identified in tracked sources: Meta (Facebook), Attentive, Zeta, PetMed Express.

Statutes Invoked

• 18 U.S.C. § 2511; Cal. Penal Code §§ 631–632; Cal. Penal Code § 502

Claims Asserted

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

• ECPA (18 U.S.C. § 2511) interception claim
• Cal. Penal Code § 631 (CIPA wiretap)
• Cal. Penal Code § 632 (CIPA eavesdropping)
• Cal. Penal Code § 502 (CDAFA)
• Common-law intrusion upon seclusion

What This Matter May Mean for Website Operators

For operators using similar technologies, the recurring factual questions in matters like this one are whether advertising pixels transmit page URLs or hashed form data before a consent choice; what page URLs and query strings analytics tools share with third parties. 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

• KRISTIN COBBS; LYNNE KAWAMINAMI; LORETTA SCHWEINSBURG v. PETMED EXPRESS, INC. — Order Granting in Part and Denying in Part Motion to Dismiss — FindLaw (U.S. District Court, S.D. Fla. opinion) · Tier A (Primary authority) · 2026-01-14

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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