A federal judge for the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia on Thursday granted class-action status to a plaintiff who alleged that health and medical corporation WebMD violated the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing video-viewing information to Meta Platforms. WebMD had argued that class certification should not be granted because the proposed class is not adequately defined or ascertainable and that individual privacy settings impede the commonality requirement.
On Tuesday, monetization platform Patreon asked the U.S. District Court for Northern California to reject more than 900 opt-outs in a settlement about privacy violations. Patreon argued the opt-outs, submitted by the law firm Lexclaim, the contingent objector in the case, violate the settlement agreement’s ban on group opt-outs and did not comply with the court-approved class notice.
The first class-action complaint under Washington’s 2024 My Health My Data Act was filed Monday against Amazon for allegedly harvesting the location data of users without their consent.
LinkedIn was hit with a class-action lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for Northern California for allegedly disclosing personally identifiable information (PII) and video viewing activity to Facebook without users’ consent, in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
The U.S. District Court for Massachusetts ruled Friday that it will dismiss a class-action lawsuit against TJX Companies, parent of retailer Marshalls, for lack of jurisdiction and since the plaintiff failed to allege a concrete harm. The plaintiff alleged that a “spy pixel” was embedded in TJX's promotional emails, which collected information from the receivers without their consent, violating the Arizona Telephone, Utility and Communication Service Records Act.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition to review a case that claimed Facebook allegedly violated privacy and wiretapping laws by tracking users’ internet activity after they exited the social media platform. The ruling rejected questions proposed by an objector to the $90 million settlement in the case relating to the attorney fees and plaintiff service awards.
Class action lawsuits surrounding cybersecurity breaches have risen significantly in recent years and 2024 was no exception, lawyers said during a Practising Law Institute event Thursday. Speakers discussed trends from 2024 concerning litigation about data privacy, cybersecurity breaches and the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act.
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, aren't the effective loopholes to age-verification laws that many think they are, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff said in a blog post Friday. Currently, 19 states have laws that require age verification before a user can access sites containing adult content, said bloggers Paige Collings, EFF senior speech and privacy activist, and Rindala Alajaji, EFF legislative activist.
New technologies such as the use of pixels have led to a surge -- beginning in 2022 -- of litigation involving older privacy laws because newer legislation lacks a private right of action, privacy lawyers said during a webinar Wednesday.
Privacy laws in the EU and at the state level in the U.S. serve as a basis for building an AI regulation regime, Morrison Foerster’s Marian Waldmann Agarwal and Marijn Storm said during a webinar about the intersection of privacy and AI last week. The partners discussed recent AI regulatory developments and their intersection with privacy obligations.