Plaintiff sued the operator of the online adult-products retailer Adam & Eve, claiming the company violated Pennsylvania’s wiretapping law by allowing Google Analytics to track his shopping behavior without adequate consent. The company collected detailed information about plaintiff’s searches and purchases, capturing sensitive data about his sexual orientation and preferences alongside his browsing patterns.

Defendant moved to dismiss the case, arguing that plaintiff lacked standing to sue because online shoppers have no reasonable expectation of privacy and that plaintiff’s allegations failed to state a legal claim under Pennsylvania law.

The court denied defendant’s motion. It held that plaintiff alleged a sufficiently concrete injury to establish standing because defendant’s own marketing promised privacy protection. Defendant ran television commercials touting Adam & Eve as a place to “shop privately” and stated on its homepage that it takes “privacy seriously,” creating a reasonable expectation that plaintiff’s sexual browsing habits would remain confidential. The court found that the information at issue, which concerned plaintiff’s sexual orientation and intimate preferences, ranked among the most sensitive personal data, more closely analogous to credit card information than ordinary product browsing. Defendant’s posted privacy policy, buried on an inconspicuous part of its website, could not automatically override the privacy expectations defendant itself had cultivated through advertising.

As for the statutory claim, plaintiff plausibly alleged that his website searches constituted “electronic communications” under Pennsylvania law, that Google Analytics captured the “contents” of those communications through URLs revealing what products he viewed, that Google Analytics qualifies as an intercepting “device,” and that the interception occurred in Pennsylvania. The court determined these allegations survived a motion to dismiss and should develop through discovery.

Delong v. PHE, Inc., 2026 WL 2075564 (E.D. Pa. July 16, 2026)