Video game developer Ubisoft, Inc. came out on top earlier this month in the Northern District of California when a judge dismissed, with prejudice, a class action claiming that the company’s use of third-party website pixels...more
As the privacy litigation landscape continues to take shape, search bars have quietly become a Trojan horse in online data collection, carrying new legal theories into the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) arena. The...more
In 2024, plaintiffs across the United States filed various class action cases related to web tracking technology employed by companies to enhance user experience on their websites and to improve the efficacy of their...more
Amid the continued wave of consumer class action lawsuits targeting the use of cookies, pixels, beacons, and other tracking tools on organizations’ websites, a recent decision from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court...more
In recent months, a wave of lawsuits has swept across the nation, targeting websites for allegedly violating state wiretapping laws through their use of tracking software. Despite none of these statutes explicitly addressing...more
In a critical new decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has confirmed that the state’s anti-wiretapping statute does not extend to website tracking technologies. In Vita v. New England Baptist Hospital, the Court...more
In a long-awaited decision affecting the scope of privacy protections in Massachusetts, on October 24, 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) held that collecting and transmitting user browsing activities,...more
Over the past decade, businesses and institutions with public-facing websites have increasingly turned to internet tracking technologies, such as cookies, pixels, and session replay tools, to optimize their websites and offer...more
Keypoint: Massachusetts’ highest court ruled the use of software that tracks users’ activity on its website does not violate the state’s Wiretap Act, which was intended to prevent the recording or interception of...more
In a significant decision for website operators, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court clarified that tracking users’ web activity does not constitute illegal wiretapping under the state’s Wiretap Act. The court found that...more
In a closely watched decision, the highest court in Massachusetts has rejected the theory that third-party website tracking technology violates G. L. c. 272, § 99, the Massachusetts Wiretap Act....more
Businesses that use website tracking software to monitor activity for marketing purposes must comply with a growing list of state laws – but does that include a nearly 60-year-old Massachusetts law requiring consent to record...more
It has now become commonplace for Plaintiffs’ attorneys to bring claims alleging that routine marketing techniques, including the deployment of behavioral advertising cookies and pixels, constitute wiretaps in violation of...more
Pretrial detention imposes severe burdens on a defendant's ability to prepare for trial. One such burden is that the prosecution may receive, without a warrant, recordings of the defendant's electronic communications,...more
Readers of this blog are familiar with the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”), and the systematic transformation of CIPA wiretapping cases since their inception. Applying CIPA, a Washington State federal court...more
Businesses operating public facing websites that employ data analytics software to track users’ website interactions must be aware of a novel use of the California Information Privacy Act (“CIPA”) that has taken the...more
Recently, companies have found themselves defending allegations that the use of third-party pixel tracking technology on their websites violates state consumer privacy laws. Fortunately, these claims do not always survive the...more
The parents of a Gainesville, Georgia high school baseball player who died after he was hit in the head at baseball practice have filed a lawsuit against the school system and his coaches....more
Perhaps at no time in modern history have employers seemingly had less of a grip on their workforce. The amorphous, pre-COVID, practices of “flex time” and work-from-home have been stretched and snapped back to a point of...more
Pretrial detention imposes several unreasonable burdens on a defendant's ability to prepare for trial. One such burden is that the prosecution often gains access—without a warrant—to the defendant's telephone calls because...more
If you are participating in the digital advertising ecosystem, you likely are hearing a lot about pixels, tags, scripts and SDKs lately. But the terminology can be confusing, and terms are not always used consistently, making...more
2023 saw a continued uptick in privacy litigation filings throughout the United States, with Plaintiffs counsel taking aim at cookies, session replay, video URLs, online “doxing” and the use of other online tracking...more
The proliferation of class action lawsuit and arbitration claim filings under the Federal Wiretap Act and various state wiretap statutes has recently grown beyond California, as other states are now beginning to see more...more
Plaintiffs look to the past to take action against modern web tracking - As states rapidly enact new consumer privacy legislation, businesses have been working tirelessly to comply with extensive new data protection...more
This is the fourth installment in our monthly data privacy litigation reports to provide updates on how courts in the United States have handled emerging data privacy tends in the past month. In this post we look at...more