Stop the wiretap shakedown on Main Street

For too long, the trial bar has treated small businesses as easy targets for lawsuits and settlements. Recently, in my home state of Texas, a skincare company faced a threat of litigation alleging it had violated a California wiretapping statute. The alleged surveillance tool? Website cookies. Settling the claim would cost the company more than $20,000.

This Texas company is not alone. This is one of the growing number of lawsuits against small businesses brought under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. This California law is not new. It was enacted when Lyndon Johnson was president, long before the internet existed. Today, crafty trial attorneys are exploiting the law’s broad language to turn ordinary website use into grounds for a payout.

Attorneys have filed more than 5,600 lawsuits alleging that common website tools — including chat boxes, cookies, analytics software, and pixels — violate the decades-old wiretapping law. Their theory is that transmitting a website visitor’s information to a third-party technology provider without proper consent constitutes an unlawful interception.

Electricians, restaurants, retailers, plumbers, and car dealerships have faced similar claims, as have nonprofits and local governments . One California plumbing contractor, responding to a demand over her website’s chat box, said: “ We are not wiretappers. We are just plumbers .”

I have spent my entire career in the car business. It never occurred to me that adding a chat window to a dealership website could put someone in the same legal category as tapping a telephone. But Automotive News reported that dealer websites are now a standing target.

Uncertainty about this law’s full scope and impact is problematic. The financial consequences can be substantial. The law provides for statutory damages of $5,000 per violation . For small businesses, the threat alone can make settling cheaper than proving they did nothing wrong.

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. The local plumber and the family-owned retailer cannot.

For local entrepreneurs and business owners, the question is: How much will it cost to make this go away?

In 2025, California state Sen. Anna Caballero (D) introduced legislation to curb one category of private lawsuits under the California Invasion of Privacy Act involving website tracking. But that legislation does not tackle the broader issue. Other wiretapping claims remain, and businesses still lack a clear line between ordinary website technology and alleged illegal interception.

This is where Congress can step in. Last week, Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) introduced the Halt Abusive Internet Lawsuits Act , which would exclude ordinary commercial website technology from wiretap and eavesdropping laws.

If a Democrat in California and a Republican in Idaho examined the same problem and reached the same conclusion, it should tell us something.

Everyone agrees that businesses that deceive consumers or misuse their information should be held accountable. But protecting privacy does not require treating ordinary website tools as telephone wiretaps.

Main Street cannot operate under a legal guessing game in which ordinary technology can expose a business to thousands of dollars in liability.

As chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, my job is to ensure Congress maintains a regulatory environment where business can flourish. We should modernize federal law and clarify where traditional surveillance statutes end, and modern internet privacy law begins.

Consumers deserve robust privacy protections, and small businesses deserve clear rules.

Main Street should be focused on job creation, not settling frivolous lawsuits that threaten their livelihood. Every dollar spent to fight one of these claims is a dollar that never makes it into a paycheck.

Roger Williams represents the 25th District in Texas and is chairman of the House Committee on Small Business.