In September 2024, a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Illinois alleged that tracking tools on Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre website expose private consumer information without their knowledge or consent. The company’s FreeStyle.Abbott website provides educational tools for the CGM technology, cost and coverage information and more.
Plaintiffs Lily Nguyen, Emzora Mitchell and Frank Ortega filed the suit. They claimed the site’s software tracked users and sent their data back to third parties like Google, Meta and more. They claimed that the tracking tools used by Abbott allow the unauthorized third parties to intercept customer communications. These tools also enable the third parties to view private information and mine that information, according to the complaint. This could lead to monetizing data to deliver targeted advertisements, among other things.
The suit claimed that activity on the website led to targeted advertisements on Facebook and Instagram related to diabetes management. Medtronic faced a similar data sharing lawsuit in 2023.
Judge Manish S. Shah dismissed the initial complaint last year. After the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, Abbott moved to have that dismissed as well.
In a ruling yesterday, March 2, 2026, Shah granted Abbott’s motion.
Reasoning behind the tossing of the suit against Abbott
Shah stated that the plaintiffs failed to sufficiently allege the disclosure of HIPAA-protected information to Abbott in the initial complaint. In the amended complaint, the plaintiffs managed to plausibly allege that Abbott received personally identifiable health condition information as a healthcare provider. However, the plaintiffs failed to adequately demonstrate that Abbott knowingly disclosed protected information to Meta or Google.
Additionally, Shah said that Abbott argued that the plaintiffs failed to allege facts that it breached any duty owed to them. The medtech giant also said the plaintiffs failed to allege proximate causes or damages.
The plaintiffs couldn’t adequately show that Abbott disclosed HIPAA-protected information to Meta or Google, the judge said. A person’s social media identifiers and gender aren’t the kind of non-public personal information protected by law as well, according to Shah. Shah said that Abbott did not breach the duty owed to plaintiffs. The judge dismissed claims of negligence on those grounds.
Plaintiffs said that Abbott “aided and abetted” the third parties’ attempts to gather information. However, Shah said that, while Meta or Google might infer medical history or conditions for patients based on their subscription to a free trial of the MyFreeStyle Program, the extent of that inference is limited. The plaintiffs failed to plausibly allege that the third parties received specific substantive information typed or clicked into Abbott’s website.
“Dismissal is with prejudice,” Shah said. “Plaintiffs have been given an opportunity to amend their complaint once. The facts set forth in the amended complaint preclude plaintiffs from plausibly alleging negligence or violations of the ECPA and CIPA.”
