In D’Antonio v. Smith & Wesson Inc., No. 5:25-CV-03085-PCP, 2026 WL 2653811, at *1 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 8, 2026), the Court denied Defendants’ motion to dismiss finding that the amended complaint sufficiently detailed to give notice of the claims and defenses. The court noted that any challenge to whether the tracking technology fell outside the statutory definition of a pen register could be addressed on a fuller record.
Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint alleged that Defendants violated privacy rights under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”) by placing cookies on users’ devices even after they rejected them, unlawfully using a pen register and tracking users on their website. Smith & Wesson moved to dismiss Plaintiffs’ claims, arguing that CIPA privacy claims lacked sufficient detail.
The Court held that Plaintiffs sufficiently pleaded an aiding-and-abetting violation by describing all interactions with the website that included specific search enquiries communicated from Plaintiffs to the website and thus involved the “contests” of their communications with the website.
Further, the Court stated that Defendants’ argument that Plaintiffs failed to connect their integration to “any specific cookies, any specific transmission, or any specific third party that allegedly received their communications” failed because Defendants read a level of specificity into pleading requirements that is unrealistic. Additionally, Defendants’ arguments that Plaintiffs failed to allege the processing platform used by Defendants and that Plaintiffs failed to establish that their communication was actually intercepted are factual issues that are best resolved at a later stage on the case.
Defendants’ “pen register” arguments failed as well. The Court held that the examples of metadata provided by Plaintiffs could include any connection between a device and website. That does not mean, however, that Plaintiffs must plead exactly how metadata regarding their communications with the website was tracked. This level of specificity is not required at the pleading stage. Instead, whether the cookies installed in Plaintiffs’ devices enabled the tracking of information falling within the pen register statute is best determined on the basis of a complete factual record regarding not only what was tracked but also where the purported pen register device was installed and whether it tracked the “dialing, routing, addressing, or singling information” for outgoing communications from that device.
In sum, D’Antonio v. Smith & Wesson Inc. demonstrates that plaintiffs asserting CIPA claims need not plead the precise technical mechanisms underlying website tracking at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Where plaintiffs identify specific communications with a website and plausibly allege that cookies or other tracking technologies captured or transmitted information associated with those communications, the claims may survive despite uncertainty regarding the particular cookies, third parties, processing platforms, or technical means of interception involved. The Court’s decision therefore recognizes that these issues often require factual development and discovery rather than dismissal at the pleading stage. Ultimately, D’Antonio reinforces that CIPA plaintiffs must provide sufficient factual allegations to make their privacy claims plausible, but they are not required to plead technical details that are largely within defendants’ control before discovery.
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