Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
Many people have long given up the hope of having any privacy when we’re online. From cookies to tracking search results to targeted advertising, it’s pretty widely accepted that the internet is not a private place, although many users continue to insist internet companies stop tracking our every move.
Back in 2010, Facebook was storing digital cookies on consumers’ internet browsers and using those cookies to track the users’ visits to other sites that contained Facebook’s “like” button (which allows viewers to post a like of the article or website to their Facebook account without leaving the page). The tracking continued even after users had logged out of their Facebook accounts.
Facebook had promised consumers it would delete the cookies, but the company continued to access information on the cookies until 2011, when an independent researcher brought the issue to the attention of the public. At that point, a class of plaintiffs sued Facebook for allegedly violating federal and California state privacy laws by using the cookies. The time period for the lawsuit goes from April 2010, when the company said it had stopped using cookies, to September 2011, when the tech giant actually stopped using the cookies after it had been outed.
Although a lot can change in five years, the plaintiffs are still pursuing their claims against Facebook, having revised their allegations after the judge dismissed their original claims in the fall of 2015. Continue reading ›