The California Supreme Court held last week that the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act of 1971 (Civil Code § 1747 et. seq.) prohibits merchants from requesting and storing consumers’ zip codes in the course of completing card transactions.
In Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma Stores, Inc., No. S178241 (Cal., Feb. 10, 2011), the high court reversed two lower court decisions, including the underlying case that was on appeal before the court and Party City Corp. v. Superior Court, 169 Cal. App.4th 497 (2008), which had previously held that zip codes were not “personal identification information” (“PII”).
The Supreme Court held that zip codes are PII and therefore cannot be collected by merchants during credit card transactions.
Please see full alert below for more information.
Firefox recommends the PDF Plugin for Mac OS X for viewing PDF documents in your browser.
We can also show you Legal Updates using the Google Viewer; however, you will need to be logged into Google Docs to view them.
Please choose one of the above to proceed!
LOADING PDF: If there are any problems, click here to download the file.
