Shawn Delong v. PHE, Inc.
Summary
The Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed Delong v. PHE, Inc. (Aug. 25, 2025) without prejudice because the plaintiff failed to allege a concrete Article III injury from the defendant's use of Google Analytics on its Adam & Eve website. The court alternatively held it lacked specific personal jurisdiction over PHE for the web-browsing-based claim and did not reach the merits of the WESCA claim.
Litigation Status
Procedural Posture
Plaintiff filed a putative class action alleging that PHE (owner/operator of the Adam & Eve website) used Google Analytics to collect and share non-anonymized IP addresses and browsing/purchase data, in violation of WESCA; defendant moved to dismiss for lack of Article III standing, lack of personal jurisdiction, and failure to state a claim; the court dismissed the complaint without prejudice for lack of standing and alternatively for lack of personal jurisdiction.
Reported Holding
The district court dismissed the complaint without prejudice, holding that the plaintiff lacked Article III standing because he did not allege a concrete injury or a reasonable expectation of privacy in his online browsing on the defendant's Adam & Eve website; the court alternatively found no personal jurisdiction over PHE in Pennsylvania. The court did not reach the merits of the WESCA claim.
What the Court Decided
The court granted the defendant's motion to dismiss on the grounds that the plaintiff failed to allege a concrete, Article III injury (lack of reasonable expectation of privacy in routine online shopping/tracking) and, alternatively, that the court lacked specific personal jurisdiction over PHE for the web-browsing-based claim. The complaint was dismissed without prejudice.
What the Court Did Not Decide
The court did not decide the merits of the plaintiff's WESCA claim (it expressly declined to reach the defendant's argument that the complaint fails to state a claim under the statute).
Significance
Generally viewed as defense-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
- Google Analytics
- web analytics/tracking
Third parties named or identified in tracked sources: PHE, Inc., Google.
Statutes Invoked
Claims Asserted
- Violation of Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act (WESCA), 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5701
What This Matter May Mean for Website Operators
Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act (WESCA) is an all-party consent statute with a private right of action. Consent standard and private enforceability are the structural features that most shape where website tracking claims are filed and how they are valued.
For operators using similar technologies, the recurring factual questions in matters like this one are what page URLs and query strings analytics tools share with third parties. Our scanner tests these behaviors empirically.
The reported outcome direction at the standing stage reflects how tracked sources characterize the ruling; such rulings are often narrow, posture-specific, and fact-bound rather than broad statements of law.
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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