Over the past year, a barrage of class action lawsuits asserting violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”)—a vintage Reagan-era federal consumer privacy law—has shed light on potential liability facing companies that embed video content onto company websites and simultaneously collect and share consumer viewing data in the course of marketing analytics.
The VPPA
From court closures and the way judges conduct appearances and trials to the expected wave of lawsuits across a multitude of areas and industries, the COVID-19 outbreak is having a notable impact in the litigation space—and is expected to for quite some time.
To help navigate the litigation landscape, we are kicking off a webinar
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses around the world had been bracing for the financial and operational 
impact of the new California Consumers Privacy Act (“CCPA”), which took effect January 1, 2020. Despite existing and ongoing uncertainty around how to comply and interpret the law, the courts had already began seeing private class actions brought
Synopsis: On December 6, 2019, the Federal Trade Commission issued a unanimous ruling against political data firm Cambridge Analytica for violating Section 5 of the FTC Act by misrepresenting that it would not download personally identifiable information when it in fact harvested this information from over 50 million Facebook users. Specifically, Cambridge Analytica represented that
On Thursday, July 11, 2019, a diverse group of trade associations spanning numerous industries, including retail, telecom, manufacturing, and food and beverage, urged Congress to enact a consumer privacy law. In a letter to the Senate and House commerce committees, the coalition of 27 industry groups asked Congress “to act quickly to adopt a robust
In light of the recent uptick in litigation involving the decade-old Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the Illinois state legislature is now considering amending the Act to allow for business efficiency and to bring the Act back to what some believe to be its original intent.
Continue Reading BIPA: Exemptions May Be On The Horizon For The Decade-Old Statute
Executive Summary and Takeaway. User agreements for websites and apps have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, and courts have had to adapt traditional rules of contract interpretation to the new digital frontier. On June 25, 2018, the First Circuit reversed a district court decision enforcing an arbitration clause contained in the terms of service for the defendant’s smartphone app, finding that those terms were not sufficiently “conspicuous” for a user to know that he or she had agreed to be bound by them. The First Circuit’s decision continues a trend of judicial hostility to arbitration clauses, and is notable for its scrutiny of the record below: the court studied in minute detail the design and content of the registration screen containing a hyperlink to the terms of service—including the size, shape, color, font, and location of the hyperlink—and concluded that the link to the terms of service failed “to grab the user’s attention.” Businesses with similar user agreements governed by Massachusetts law or that could potentially apply to Massachusetts consumers should review their websites and/or apps to ensure that their platforms disclose any terms of use in a clear and conspicuous manner in relation to the rest of the content on the screen.
Additional Background. To use the services provided by the defendant company (the “Company”) via its smartphone app, a customer must first register with the Company by creating an account. As part of the registration process, users are shown a screen that requests their payment information and notifies them that by creating an account they are agreeing to the Company’s Terms of Service and its Privacy Policy:
The words “Terms of Service & Privacy Policy” are in a clickable box that includes a hyperlink. Upon clicking on that hyperlink, the user is directed to a screen with two other links: one to the Terms of Service, and the other to the Privacy Policy. The user can view either document by clicking on the appropriate link.Continue Reading First Circuit Invalidates Arbitration Clause in Mobil App User Agreement
California Penal Code section 632.7 imposes criminal liability and, pursuant to Penal Code section 637.2, civil liability upon persons who intercept or receive a communication involving a cellular or cordless telephone and record the communication without consent. The section and its sister provision, Penal Code section 632, are popular among class action plaintiffs in California
On Tuesday, June 11, 2013, the Seventh Circuit denied comScore’s appeal from the district court’s ruling granting class certification, thereby allowing a class of tens of millions of plaintiffs from around the world to proceed to trial as a class action suit. In re comScore, Inc., No. 13-8007 (7th Cir. June 11, 2013).
ComScore
On April 8, 2013, the United States District Court for the Central District of California denied the plaintiff’s motion for class certification in Torres v. Nutrisystem, Inc., SACV 12-01854-CJC (JPRx), a lawsuit alleging Nutrisystem violated California Penal Code sections 632 and 632.7.
Penal Code section 632 prohibits the surreptitious recording of confidential communications made over