The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in Kathleen Vita v. New England Baptist Hospital , has sparked significant debate by ruling that the state’s Wiretap Act (G. L.
c. 272, § 99) does not apply to website tracking software. The case centered on allegations that two hospitals, New England Baptist Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Inc.
, violated the state’s Massachusetts Wiretap Act by using undisclosed tracking software, such as Meta or Google’s pixels, to collect and disclose patients’ private health information. The court ultimately reversed the lower court’s denial of the hospitals’ motions to dismiss, finding the statute ambiguous in this context and applying the rule of lenity in the hospitals’ favor. Background Facts Kathleen Vita alleged that the hospitals “intercepted” her communications by tracking her activity on their websites.
This tracking included information like information about doctors (including their credentials and backgrounds), search for information on particular symptoms, conditions, and medical procedures, the URLs visited, webpage titles, browser and device configurations, unique identifiers used by third-party software, and IP addresses. Vita further alleged that the hospitals collected data on user scrolling, clicking, form navigation (including department selection but excluding form contents), search terms, “Find a Doctor” filtering criteria, navigation to billing and patient portal pages (excluding the.