House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams (R-Texas) is pressing Congress to update federal surveillance law, arguing that a wave of predatory lawsuits is using a decades-old California wiretapping statute to shake down small businesses over routine website technology.
In an op-ed published Tuesday, Williams highlighted the case of a Texas skincare company that faced a $20,000 settlement demand after being sued under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) for using website cookies. The law, enacted in 1968, was never designed for the internet age, but trial lawyers have repurposed its broad language to target businesses that deploy standard digital tools like chat boxes, analytics software, and pixels.
According to Williams, more than 5,600 lawsuits have been filed alleging that transmitting a website visitor's data to third-party providers without explicit consent constitutes unlawful interception. The plaintiffs' bar has gone after electricians, restaurants, retailers, plumbers, car dealerships, nonprofits, and even local governments. One California plumbing contractor, hit with a demand over her site's chat feature, responded: “We are not wiretappers. We are just plumbers.”
Williams, a longtime car dealer, said he never imagined that adding a chat window to a dealership website could put someone in the same legal category as tapping a phone. But Automotive News has reported that dealer websites are now a standing target. The financial stakes are severe: CIPA allows statutory damages of $5,000 per violation, making settlement cheaper than fighting in court for many small firms.
“A large corporation can hire lawyers to litigate the meaning of 'interception' and whether a particular piece of software violates a statute enacted before the internet existed,” Williams wrote. “The local plumber and the family-owned retailer cannot.”
California state Sen. Anna Caballero (D) introduced a bill in 2025 to curb one category of CIPA website-tracking lawsuits, but Williams argues that doesn't go far enough. He is backing the Halt Abusive Internet Lawsuits Act, introduced last week by Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho), which would exclude ordinary commercial website technology from wiretap and eavesdropping laws.
Williams noted the bipartisan convergence: “If a Democrat in California and a Republican in Idaho examined the same problem and reached the same conclusion, it should tell us something.” He stressed that legitimate privacy violations should still be punished, but that “protecting privacy does not require treating ordinary website tools as telephone wiretaps.”
The push comes as Congress weighs broader tech regulation, and Williams's committee has made small-business relief a priority. He called on lawmakers to “modernize federal law and clarify where traditional surveillance statutes end, and modern internet privacy law begins,” adding that Main Street should be focused on job creation, not frivolous litigation.
