Meta's Motion to Sever Claims Another 'Tactic' to Avoid Litigating: Plaintiff
Meta’s March 28 conditional motion to sever claims (see 2303300042) is “part of its many tactics" to avoid litigating “Jane Doe’s” privacy claims against it, Hey Favor, FullStory and TikTok, said Doe’s Thursday opposition in U.S. District Court for Northern…
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California in San Francisco. Doe noted Meta “already failed once” to relate the case to Doe v. GoodRx, saying “this time” the tech company is arguing the claims against it should be severed for purposes of consolidating with Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation (docket 3:22-cv-03580). Severance wouldn't bring efficiencies because “the claims Meta seeks to excise concern different services, that incorporate different technology, used by different individuals, for different purposes, that caused the transmission of different data” to different defendants from those in the hospital actions, said the opposition. The Hey Favor case “is not, and has never been” related to the hospital actions, it said. The hospital actions, brought by five hospital patients who used online “patient portals” (myMedStar, MyChart and MyHealth), “are even less like this Action than the GoodRx Action,” said the opposition. Doe v. Hey Favor seeks to represent a class that used Hey Favor’s mobile and web app that provides contraception and birth control. Jane Doe alleges Favor sends answers to personal information, such as answers to birth control questions and purchase history, through tracking tools, to Meta, TikTok, ByteDance and FullStory. Plaintiffs in the hospital actions claim their data was collected exclusively through web-based patient portals that incorporated a single technology -- the Meta Pixel -- "which is not present (and cannot be used) on the mobile version of the Favor App," Doe said. The hospital actions, by contrast, represent hospital patients who allegedly used passive patient portals on hospital websites. Meta argued in its motion to sever claims that the allegations and claims in Hey Favor were “fully covered and subsumed within” Meta Pixel Healthcare Litigation.