“Rx glasses starting at $95.” Most people read that subject line and think, huh, cheap glasses. Bianca Garcia read it and saw three causes of action and a putative class she says could top 100,000 people. Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett read her complaint and did what every good optometrist does with a blurry chart: she made things much clearer, mostly for the defense.
In Garcia v. Warby Parker Inc., No. 2:26-cv-02980-SPG-MBK, 2026 WL 3036405 (C.D. Cal. Oct. 8, 2026), the court tossed a spam claim as preempted by CAN-SPAM and dismissed the tracking pixel claims for lack of standing. If you’ve ever opened a demand letter that read like a horror movie and a legal pleading had a baby, this one’s for you.
Here’s the story. Garcia says Warby Parker emailed her with a forged header, a spoofed domain (ipayt.com), and that catchy subject line. She clicked through to warbyparker.com, where tracking pixels supposedly let data brokers LiveIntent and PodScribe scoop up her information and sell it to the highest bidder. From this she decided to bring lawsuit based on alleged violations of the Business & Professions Code § 17529.5, Penal Code § 638.51, and a good old fashioned intrusion upon seclusion claim.
The court addressed the spam claim first, and preemption did the honors. The Ninth Circuit reads CAN-SPAM to “broadly preempt state regulation of commercial e-mail,” leaving only a narrow opening for laws aimed at falsity or deception. Gordon v. Virtumundo, Inc., 575 F.3d 1040, 1061 (9th Cir. 2009). To squeeze through and have a clear (optometry related pun very much intended) claim, a plaintiff has to show the email “contains material misrepresentations,” Silverstein v. Keynetics Inc., 192 F. Supp. 3d 1045, 1048 (N.D. Cal. 2016), in the “traditionally tortious or wrongful” sense. Andrews v. Conversion Squared Corp., 2020 WL 3978063, at *2 (C.D. Cal. May 8, 2020) (quoting Gordon). Garcia attempted to go through all three doors in § 17529.5(a), and each one turned out to be locked.
The domain name theory ran into Gordon, which has already shrugged at domains that give “incomplete or less than comprehensive information regarding the sender.” 575 F.3d at 1064. The header theory had a bigger problem given that Garcia attached the email as Exhibit A, and the “from” line read “WarbyParker Affiliate.” It’s hard to say you were fooled about who sent an email when your own exhibit tells you. She cited Greenberg v. Digital Media Solutions, LLC (2021) 65 Cal. App. 5th 909, 920, but that case only says a domain needn’t “explicitly state the name of the sender,” and finds trouble when a domain falsely suggests no connection to the real sender. Here, her own exhibit, in no blurry fashion (again pun intended), shows the connection.
That leaves the star of the show, the subject line. Garcia said the offer turned out to be “illusory,” but the court was not convinced and simply called that a legal conclusion especially since she never alleged she was deceived about what the email actually was. To be far, this area of law is not all one-way traffic, though. In Rodriguez v. Endurance Warranty Services, L.L.C., 2026 WL 1110696 (S.D. Cal. Apr. 23, 2026), the complaint survived because plaintiffs plausibly alleged “subject lines likely to mislead a recipient” after the advertised discount vanished the moment they clicked. That is a fact a court can work with. Garcia, by contrast, offered an adjective, calling the $95 offer “illusory” without saying what she found when she clicked or why the price wasn’t real. Facts beat adjectives, and in this case the court was left with only the adjective.
The pixel claims fared no better, and they fell on standing, which is a big deal because without it a federal court can’t hear the case at all. Citing Patel v. Facebook, Inc., 932 F.3d 1264, 1274 (9th Cir. 2019), the court asked whether the alleged violations “actually harm, or present a material risk of harm to” Garcia’s privacy interests. The statute passed the first step easily, but Garcia stalled at the second. She never said what LiveIntent or PodScribe actually do, what was intercepted, or what the “deeply personal details” were that supposedly got sold. Under Popa v. Microsoft Corp., 153 F.4th 784, 791 (9th Cir. 2025), a plaintiff who can’t point to “embarrassing, invasive, or otherwise private information” hasn’t alleged a highly offensive intrusion, and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413, 426 (2021), reminds courts to “independently decide whether a plaintiff has suffered a concrete harm” whatever the statute says.
Garcia leaned on In re Facebook, Inc. Internet Tracking Litigation, 956 F.3d 589, 599 (9th Cir. 2020), where plaintiffs said Facebook built a “cradle-to-grave profile without users’ consent” from their browsing history. The court wasn’t persuaded. On this record, all it could tell about Garcia was that she might want glasses, which isn’t a privacy invasion, it’s called shopping. Intrusion upon seclusion went down the same road, since Hernandez v. Hillsides, Inc. (2009) 47 Cal. 4th 272, 286, requires an intrusion that is “highly offensive to a reasonable person.”
Warby Parker also asked the court to strike the class allegations, and the court said not yet. That’s hardly shocking, since Garcia gets another shot at her complaint, so the court couldn’t say the allegations had “no possible bearing on the subject matter of the litigation.” LockandLocate, LLC v. Hiscox Insurance Co., 549 F. Supp. 3d 1093, 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2021). The court never blessed those class definitions, and Garcia didn’t even respond to the request so this part of the saga is not over yet. The arguments will be waiting if she amends, and again at class certification (if it even gets that far), against a plaintiff who has to find a live claim first.
There is also one more nugget that is worth mentioning. Warby Parker asked the court to take notice of seventeen other complaints Garcia has filed. The court noticed that they exist, but it can’t “take judicial notice of disputed facts contained in such public records.” Khoja v. Orexigen Therapeutics, Inc., 899 F.3d 988, 999 (9th Cir. 2018). The ruling didn’t rest on them, so that argument is still on the shelf. But this is far from over, so expect Warby Parker to bring this up again if and when Garcia amends her complaint. We have seen the Central District of California declare Vivek Shah to be a vexatious litigant so it will be interesting to see if Warby Parker tries to do the same here with Garcia.
So what if one of these letters lands on your desk? Read the actual email and any exhibit first, because the “from” line may be worth more than any argument you can dream up, and CAN-SPAM preemption is a real defense. Don’t oversell it, though, since Endurance shows a subject line claim can survive with real facts about a disappearing offer. On pixel claims, ask what was actually collected, because “tracking pixels” and “data brokers” sound scary but aren’t an injury. And keep in mind this is one district judge’s ruling, not the law of the land.
As for this case, it isn’t over yet, either. As mentioned above, Garcia has 21 days from the order, roughly October 29, to file an amended complaint, and if she doesn’t, the case is dismissed with prejudice. Until then, the next time a demand letter shows up, put on your reading glasses and check the exhibit (and make sure those reading glasses work).
Talk to you soon CIPAWorld and as always, be safe.