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?