The United States District Court for the Western District of Seattle recently dismissed an online privacy case involving the alleged improper use of browser and Flash cookies in Del Vecchio v. Amazon. Finding that the plaintiff “simply not plead adequate facts to establish any plausible harm,” this opinion follows closely on the heels of several other recent decisions that dismissed cases because of an ability to demonstrate adequate injury or harm or to allege sufficient injury-in-fact to satisfy Article III standing, including In re Facebook Privacy Litigation, In re Zynga Privacy Litigation and Low v. LinkedIn (in which Covington represents LinkedIn).
In reaching this finding, the Amazon court rejected plaintiffs’ two categories of alleged injury; namely, (1) that Amazon’s alleged misappropriation of plaintiffs’ economic and property interests led to “economic harms,” including “lack of proper value-for-value exchanges, undisclosed opportunity costs devaluation of personal information [and] loss of the economic value of the information as an asset”; and (2) that Amazon’s alleged transfer of cookies caused damage by diminishing the performance and value of plaintiffs’ computer resources. Plaintiffs were granted leave to file an amended complaint.