A California federal court has allowed privacy claims to proceed against Rack Room Shoes based on its use of embedded tracking tools on its website—signaling that companies may face liability under both state and federal privacy laws, even where data collection is disclosed in a privacy policy. In Smith v. Rack Room Shoes, Inc. (2025 WL 2210002), decided August 4, 2025, Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California declined to dismiss claims brought under the federal Wiretap Act and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris website.
Webinar: Privacy Class Action Litigation Trends
Duane Morris LLP will present a webinar, The Data Privacy and Security Landscape: Privacy Class Action Litigation Trends, on Thursday, May 30, 2024, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Eastern time.
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Will Website Chat Feature Wiretapping Lawsuits Rise?
Entering the conversation, the United States District Court for the Central District of California recently denied a motion to dismiss claims alleging that a website’s chat features and use of session replay software violate the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). Notably, this court rejected a forum selection clause in the website’s terms of use and went on to hold that allegations that the plaintiff shared “personal information” in the chat were sufficient to maintain a claim.
Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris LLP website.
Website Tracking Technology Risks
As companies take advantage of new technologies in their interactions with customers and employees, they need to be mindful of the risks associated with implementation of those types of systems. This is especially true in the realm of federal and state privacy statutes, which in some instances have been created recently to address privacy concerns. There are also existing laws that are now being applied in a different context.
Read the Law360 article on the Duane Morris LLP website.
Does Tracking User Activity on Websites Violate Electronic Interception Laws?
A new wave of class action lawsuits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Florida target companies that use technologies to track user activity on their websites, alleging such practices, when done without obtaining a user’s consent, violate electronic interception provisions of various state laws. The two technologies at issue are: 1) session replay software and 2) coding tools embedded in chat features. Session replay software tracks a user’s interactions with the website—their clicking, scrolling, swiping, hovering and typing—and creates a stylized recording of those interactions and inputs. Coding tools create and store transcripts of the conversations users have in a website’s chat feature. The plaintiffs in this new string of class actions allege that recording their interactions with a website and sending that recording to a third party for analysis without their consent is an illegal invasion of their privacy.
Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris LLP website.
Court Holds “Websites Are Not Places of Public Accommodation”
Over two years after hearing oral arguments, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals finally issued an opinion in Gil v. Winn-Dixie, Case No. 17-13467, overturning the Florida federal district court’s finding that the grocery store chain violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by having an inaccessible website. In the 67-page decision, the Court of Appeals held that “websites are not places of public accommodation” under the ADA and that the Winn-Dixie website was not an “intangible barrier” to goods, services, privileges and advantages of Winn-Dixie’s physical stores.
Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris LLP website.
Fascinating Facts About Tremendous Internet Growth
The internet is a relatively new phenomenon. But the following fascinating facts, provided by Inc.com, demonstrate that the internet has gained rapid and ubiquitous traction.
For example, while it took 75 years until telephones were used by 50 million users, Pokemon Go was adopted by 50 million users in only 19 days!
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9th Circuit Resisting Efforts to Dilute CDA Section 230 ISP Immunity?
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) generally affords immunity for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with respect to content posted by users on their websites. There have been various efforts by plaintiffs in lawsuits to chip away at this immunity, most of which have failed. Now along comes Doe v. Internet Brands, in which the plaintiff sought to convince the Ninth Circuit to circumvent CDA Section 230 immunity under a “duty to warn” theory.
Factual Allegations
The anonymous plaintiff, Jane Doe, alleged that she was a model who was enticed to travel to Florida by two men. The men drugged her, raped her, and then displayed this horrid event in a pornographic video.
Doe alleged that the two men initially found her by way of the website Model Mayhem, which she’d joined as a member. She asserted that Model Mayhem is a site that profiles hundreds of thousands of models, and that the owner of the site, Internet Brands, allegedly knew of the illegal scheme by the two men but nevertheless neglected to warn her of the potential harm. Continue reading “9th Circuit Resisting Efforts to Dilute CDA Section 230 ISP Immunity?”
Revenge Porn Website Creator Faces 31 Criminal Charges
The other shoe has dropped — a recently enacted revenge porn law has reached the point of criminal prosecution in California.
Indeed, a San Diego man has just been charged with operating a Web site that allows users to post sexual images of others so that he then allegedly could extort large sums of money from the victims whose images had been posted.
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