District Court Judge Charles Breyer (N.D. Cal.) grants Mashable’s motion to dismiss Plaintiff’s CIPA and privacy claims based on personal jurisdiction.
Mashable was originally a California corporation “but since 2013 has been a Delaware corporation with its principal place of residence in New York.” Plaintiff didn’t start visiting Mashable’s website until 2017. “Fregosa sued Mashable under California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, which makes it a crime for a person to install a pen register or trap-and-trace software without a court order. Cal. Penal Code § 638.51(a).”
When it comes to websites, the mere operation of an interactive website that is accessible in a forum state does not necessarily subject the website owner or operator to personal jurisdiction in that state. See Herbal Brands, 72 F.4th at 1091 (“[O]peration of an interactive website does not, by itself, establish express aiming. … That result would be too broad to comport with due process.”); DFSB Kollective Co. v. Bourne, 897 F. Supp. 2d 871, 881 (N.D. Cal. 2012) (“If the defendant merely operates a website, even a highly interactive website, that is accessible from, but does not target, the forum state, then the defendant may not be haled into court in that state without offending the Constitution.” (citing be2 LLC v. Ivanov, 642 F.3d 555, 559 (7th Cir. 2011))). Rather, the plaintiff must allege “ ‘something more’—conduct directly targeting the forum.” Mavrix Photo, Inc. v. Brand Techs., Inc., 647 F.3d 1218, 1229 (9th Cir. 2011) (citation omitted). “In determining whether a nonresident defendant has done ‘something more,’ [courts] have considered several factors, including the interactivity of the defendant’s website, the geographic scope of the defendant’s commercial ambitions, and whether the defendant ‘individually targeted’ a plaintiff known to be a forum resident.” Id. (citations omitted). And “[w]hen the website itself is the only jurisdictional contact, [the] analysis turns on whether the site had a forum-specific focus or the defendant exhibited an intent to cultivate an audience in the forum.” Herbal Brands, 72 F.4th at 1092 (emphasis in original).
*3 Fregosa contends that Mashable targets California residents because it knowingly enables the sale of Californians’ information, which it obtains by installing trackers on website visitors’ computers, and it earns significant revenue as a result. Opp. at 2. That fails to establish personal jurisdiction, however, because Fregosa has not alleged that Mashable has expressly aimed its activities at California. At most Fregosa has alleged facts sufficient to conclude that Mashable has targeted website users in general, some of whom happen to live in California. That is not enough. See Walden, 571 U.S. at 285.
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Fregosa’s statement that Mashable “is able to sell specific California userbases to advertisers[ ] or target advertising campaigns specifically at California users” sufficient to demonstrate that Mashable expressly aimed its activity at California. Am. Compl. ¶ 16 (emphasis added). Such speculation about what Mashable can do fails to answer the question of what Mashable actually did—the relevant inquiry for the purposeful direction test.
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[According to the Ninth Circuit] [i]f [ ] geo-located advertisements constituted express aiming, [the defendant] could be said to expressly aim at any forum in which a user views the website. As [ ] recognized in Mavrix, “not all material placed on the Internet is, solely by virtue of its universal accessibility, expressly aimed at every forum in which it is accessed.” As a feature of the geo-located advertisements on [the defendant’s] website, all users in every forum received advertisements directed at them. To find specific jurisdiction based on this would run afoul of the Supreme Court’s directive in Walden and “impermissibly allow a plaintiff’s contacts with the defendant and forum to drive the jurisdictional analysis.”
AMA Multimedia, 970 F.3d at 1211 (citations omitted) (cleaned up).
Neither the above, nor Plaintiff’s additional arguments were sufficient to show that Mashable targeted California residents and therefore, the motion to dismiss was granted.
DAWN FREGOSA, v. MASHABLE, INC., No. 25-CV-01094-CRB, 2025 WL 1083214 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 10, 2025).
