No. Because, as the ruling says, they are an intended party of the communication.

Does anyone have a summary of the actual case? Because, according to the article: "(...) Google and its co-defendants hadn’t violated the Wiretap Act because they were a “party” to the communications rather than a third-party eavesdropper—the users were visiting their websites when the cookies were installed."

So it's rather unclear if they're saying that if you go to eg: plus.google.com, google is party to the communication, or if they're saying that if you go to example.com, and example.com has installed google's analytics tracking, then google is also "party to the communication"?

The latter might make sense from the perspective that any party to an organization could invite any other party to secretly record it? (Eg: You might be on the phone with a person, and without telling that person, invite your lawyer to listen in on the call. As the person you're talking to doesn't have any expectation of privacy from you AFAIK that'd be legal (in many jurisdictions, anyway)).

So, it would seem that tracking someone visiting example.com via cookies at a third-party site, might be legal wrt. wire-tapping, but may violate requirements to alert the user of tracking/cookie use?

Hmm. I didn't intend for them to track me. I didn't know their 'like' button was on the website I intended to, and then in fact, visited. I intended to visit the website, I didn't intend for facebook to visit the website with me.

The website author apparently intended for facebook to visit, but I was not privy to that information. That's like me attending a meetup. I wanted to go to the meetup, but if my ex was there, and I knew that ahead of time, I wouldn't have gone. Now my ex has information about me I didn't intend for said ex to have.

I'm not sure if I've convinced myself that the 'like' button is legal or illegal now.