Michael Winston and David Buehler v. Safelite Group, Inc.
Summary
This is a class-action complaint filed January 23, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that safelite.com continued to deploy third-party cookies and tracking (including vendor pixels) despite users declining non-essential cookies. Plaintiffs assert multiple California statutory and common-law claims and seek class relief; the matter is at the pleading stage.
Litigation Status
Procedural Posture
Class action complaint (Document 1) filed January 23, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by plaintiffs Michael Winston and David Buehler against Safelite Group, Inc.; complaint asserts multiple statutory and common-law claims and seeks class relief.
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
- third-party cookies
- tracking technologies
- pixels (e.g., TikTok Pixel)
- Google Analytics/DoubleClick
- LinkedIn/Microsoft tracking
- Microsoft Bing tracking
- Salesforce tracking
Third parties named or identified in tracked sources: Meta (Facebook), Google (DoubleClick, Google Analytics), Microsoft (Bing, LinkedIn subsidiary), ByteDance (TikTok), Salesforce.
Statutes Invoked
- California Penal Code § 631; California Penal Code § 638.51
Claims Asserted
- Invasion of privacy
- Intrusion upon seclusion
- Wiretapping in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 631)
- Use of a pen register in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 638.51)
- Common law fraud/deceit/misrepresentation
- Unjust enrichment
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.
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
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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