A court in Texas recently dismissed a lawsuit it described as “an aspiring class action against a veritable who’s-who of social media companies.” The Plaintiffs in Opperman v. Path claimed that the Defendants improperly used their smartphone apps to copy, upload, and store Plaintiffs’ address book information without their consent. According to the court, the Plaintiffs’ … Continue Reading
According to court documents filed last week, Netflix has agreed to change its data storage practices and pay about $9 million to settle allegations that it unlawfully retained and disclosed customers’ video-viewing histories. Specifically, Netflix agreed to decouple viewing history from identification information once users have been inactive for a year; to pay $30,000 to … Continue Reading
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that put an end to a proposed class action lawsuit stemming from a data breach. The suit, Reilly v. Ceridian Corp., was brought by two individuals who were among approximately 27,000 employees at 1,900 companies whose personal and financial … Continue Reading
A putative class action was filed on Monday against Amazon.com following an online hacking attack that potentially compromised the personal information of up to 24 million customers of its online shoe retailer Zappos.com. An email sent to customers from Zappos.com’s CEO on Sunday assured users that full credit card information and other payment information was not … Continue Reading
Class action lawsuits are increasingly being brought against organizations that have suffered data breaches, as well as against companies that are alleged to have allowed third parties access to online or mobile users’ confidential information without authorization (for example the recent Del Vecchio v. Amazon and Low v. LinkedIn cases). A repeated issue in these … Continue Reading
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 … Continue Reading
The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s approval of a class action settlement last Monday in Nachshin v. AOL, remanding the two-year old case back to the district court for a new round of settlement negotiation and approval. No. 10-55129 (9th Cir. Nov. 21, 2011). The class action was brought in 2009, alleging that the … Continue Reading
In a decision with broad application, the Supreme Court held last Wednesday that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state law rules that classify class action waivers in consumer contracts as unconscionable and therefore unenforceable. The holding in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, No. 09-893 (April 27, 2011) sweeps away a major barrier to enforcing arbitration agreements … Continue Reading
Google has moved to dismiss a conslidated class action complaint alleging that it violated the federal Wiretap Act, among other laws, by allowing its Street View cars to collect the contents of communications transmitted over unsecured WiFi networks. The motion was filed in the Northern District of California, where more than a dozen suits arising out of the Street View activity were consolidated for … Continue Reading
On the eve of the reported settlement of the Flash cookie litigation by Quantcast and Clearspring, Covington alum Kashmir Hill reports at Forbes about an online practice that could be the next “Flash cookie” among privacy advocates: web history sniffing. According to the Complaint (PDF) filed last week in federal court in California, a Netherlands company called Midstream … Continue Reading
Individual plaintiffs have not had much success bringing private actions against businesses affected by security breaches. In particular, a number of courts have held that the abstract risk of identity theft is not a cognizable injury. And most recently, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has determined that even those individuals actually victimized by identity theft … Continue Reading
