What Is CIPA?

The California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) is a decades-old wiretapping law, increasingly applied to website tracking technologies, including session replay tools and chat widgets, in class-action lawsuits arguing that recording a visitor's on-site behavior without clear consent amounts to illegal wiretapping.

CIPA predates the modern web entirely, which is exactly why its recent application to website tracking has been controversial and expensive: it wasn’t written with tags or Session Replay in mind, but plaintiffs’ firms have successfully argued the underlying logic still applies. Settlements average in the hundreds of thousands to low millions of dollars, making CIPA exposure a real budget line item for any site running session recording or chat tools without clear disclosure.