A Florida circuit court has signed off on notice for a privacy settlement that traces back to something as routine as typing a drugstore item into a search bar. CVS Pharmacy and the digital advertising firm Criteo Corp. are resolving a lawsuit alleging that terms typed into CVS’s website and app search bar were captured and passed along to outside advertisers without permission. The case covers a class that could include tens of millions of people who used CVS’s digital properties, and the settlement administrator has now opened a claim window that runs into the middle of November.
What CVS’s Search Bar Sent to Advertisers
According to the operative amended complaint in the case, Adobe Experience Cloud tracking code embedded on CVS’s website captured the exact text shoppers typed into the search bar at the top of cvs.com, along with the web address of the resulting search-results page, and transmitted both to Adobe’s servers. The complaint walks through a search for “aspirin” as an illustration, showing the tracker relaying the full search-results URL, the search term itself, and the specific products and SKU numbers returned. The same mechanism, the complaint alleges, recorded searches for far more sensitive categories, including “birth control,” “pregnancy tests,” “fertility tests” and “paternity tests,” none of which shoppers were told was being captured or shared.
Two of the four named plaintiffs describe a similar pattern in the complaint: after searching CVS’s site for over-the-counter products tied to a private medical condition, one plaintiff says he began seeing targeted advertisements for related medications and, separately, for sexual health products, on websites unconnected to CVS. The complaint attributes that pattern to data shared between Adobe and Criteo, the digital advertising firm that supplies ad support on CVS’s website and app.
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A Fund Capped at Up to $20.5 Million
The case, Brewer, et al. v. CVS Pharmacy, Inc. and Criteo Corp., No. CACE-26-008094, is pending in the Circuit Court for the 17th Judicial Circuit in and for Broward County, Florida. CVS and Criteo deny they violated any law, and the settlement does not determine which side was correct. To resolve the case, the companies have agreed to a settlement of up to $20.5 million, a ceiling on what the fund can pay out rather than a guaranteed pot that gets paid in full. The court notice describes the same figure only in legal shorthand, calling it the “Maximum Cash Payment,” the number class counsel’s fee request is measured against: attorneys can seek up to 37.5% of that Maximum Cash Payment, plus service awards of up to $2,500 apiece for the four people who brought the suit.
Who Qualifies and What a Claim Pays
The settlement class, as defined in Circuit Judge Shari Africk Olefson’s July 27, 2026 preliminary approval order, covers all living individuals who accessed CVS’s digital properties — cvs.com, cvshealth.com or the CVS mobile app — in the United States at any point before that date. That definition sweeps in essentially anyone who searched, browsed or shopped on CVS’s site or app before the settlement was preliminarily approved, whether or not they remember doing so.
A claim submitted with no supporting documentation pays up to $5. A claim submitted with proof of having used CVS’s digital properties, such as a purchase receipt, an email confirmation or a dated screenshot, pays up to $10. Because the fund is capped rather than open-ended, individual payments can shrink on a pro rata basis if the number of valid claims filed is high enough that the Maximum Cash Payment does not stretch to cover every claim at its full stated amount.
Filing Before the November 16 Deadline
Filing a claim is the only way to receive money from the settlement, and the deadline is fixed: the notice requires any Claim Form to be filed by 11:59 p.m. EST on November 16, 2026, either submitted online through the settlement website or postmarked by that date if mailed. Doing nothing forfeits both the payment and the right to sue CVS and Criteo later over the same data-sharing claims, since staying in the class and skipping the claim form still counts as accepting the settlement’s terms.
Two other deadlines fall two weeks earlier than the claim cutoff. Anyone who wants to preserve the right to sue CVS and Criteo independently has to submit a formal request for exclusion by November 1, 2026, and anyone who wants to challenge the settlement’s terms in court has to file a written objection by that same date. Missing either one means being bound by whatever the court ultimately decides in December, regardless of whether a claim form was ever filed.
What the December Hearing Still Has to Decide
Nothing about the settlement is final yet. Judge Olefson has scheduled a hearing for 9:30 a.m. EST on December 1, 2026, held virtually by Zoom, where the court will weigh whether the deal is fair, reasonable and adequate to the class, rule on class counsel’s fee request, and set the amount of the service awards for the four class representatives — Justin Brewer, Ariel Brooks, Alex Sisti and Marc Weinberger — who brought the case. If the settlement receives final approval and any appeal period runs out without a challenge, the notice states that approved payments go out roughly 120 days later, delivered by PayPal, Venmo, Zelle or mailed check, with any check expiring 180 days after it is issued.
Reading a Claim Notice
A settlement notice like the one CVS class members received packs a case number, a class definition, a payment schedule and four separate deadlines into a few dense pages, and the CVS notice is typical of the format: one date to file a claim, an earlier date to opt out, that same earlier date to object, and a hearing date months later that still has to happen before anyone gets paid. Households that read a notice like this once, quickly, often catch the headline payment deadline but miss that opting out or objecting requires acting two weeks sooner. Nothing about a settlement notice is written to be skimmed, and the cost of misreading one is a right that cannot be recovered afterward.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System is built around the four-date rule for reading a settlement notice like CVS’s, paired with a claim log and payment tracker for keeping deadlines like these from running together.
See the four-date rule and the claim log in The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
