Class Action Lawsuit Claims Third-Party Trackers on Tesla Website Collect User Data Without Consent

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims Tesla enables the use of third-party trackers on its website to access, collect and profit from users’ data without their consent.

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According to the 32-page lawsuit, Tesla has violated California privacy laws by allowing several pixel trackers—including the Google Ads/DoubleClick tracker, Twitter tracker and Optimizely tracker—to be embedded on its website and secretly transmit vast amounts of user data from the browsers of website visitors.

Trackers, the lawsuit states, are typically transparent, single-pixel images or lightweight JavaScript snippets that begin collecting user data upon activation—i.e., when a website is loaded or a user performs a tracked action.

The filing relays that the trackers embedded on Tesla’s website transmit detailed user data and browsing activity—including IP addresses, screen resolution, operating system, browser and device type, mouse movements, click behavior, scroll depth, pages visited, unique identifiers like cookies and ad IDs, session duration and geolocation information—to Google, X Corp (Twitter) and Optimizely.

Per the complaint, the trackers fall under the definition of “pen registers” and/or “trap and tap devices” under the California Penal Code because they collect routing and addressing information for commercial purposes without user interaction.

The complaint claims that Tesla has a significant financial incentive to track user data without obtaining consent. According to the case, such data is lucrative to businesses, particularly in advertising, given it can be used for behavioral profiling, cross-device tracking, ad targeting and participation in real-time advertising auctions. Trackers can help identify individual users based on IP addresses and behavioral patterns, a process called “digital fingerprinting,” and these profiles can then be used to assess the most effective advertising to be sent to individual users, the case relays.

Citing a study by the McKinsey global consultancy, the lawsuit says businesses that “leverage customer behavior insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.”

Per the suit, visitors to Tesla’s website never consented to or expected the company to monetize and disclose their data to the likes of Google and X.

The Tesla class action lawsuit looks to represent individuals in California whose browsers were subject to installation, execution, embedding or injection of the trackers mentioned on this page by Tesla’s website during the relevant statute of limitations period.

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