Emily Sortor  |  January 27, 2020

Category: Electronics

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SanDiskConsumers will not be able to pursue a class action lawsuit that alleges SanDisk falsely advertised the storage size of its flash drives and memory cards, as a California federal judge decided to dismiss the claims.

According to U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman, SanDisk’s use of the term gigabyte to describe the amount of storage in some memory cards and flash drives was not deceptive.

The judge went on to say that the consumers did not provide any evidence that SanDisks’ advertisement was deceptive, other than noting that SanDisk uses the term gigabyte. In the judge’s words, the customers “do not allege any words or images other than GB that might be misleading.”

The judge elaborated as to why just the word gigabyte itself was not misleading. She agreed with SanDisk’s argument that gigabyte is an ambiguous term, so if consumers made an assumption about the amount of storage present in a one gigabyte memory card that was different from the one used by SanDisk, that did not necessarily mean that SanDisk was being misleading.

Consumers in the SanDisk class action lawsuit had argued that SanDisk uses the term “gigabyte” to refer to an amount of storage equal to 1 billion gigabytes. The plaintiffs claimed that in contrast, most computer systems use the term gigabyte to be equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes.

According to the SanDisk storage class action lawsuit, many customers may be accustomed to the larger size, and will make purchasing assumptions based on that measurement.

The SanDisk memory card class action lawsuit argued that SanDisk had not “meaningfully, adequately, or conspicuously” misled consumers into thinking that the devices had more memory than they really do.

The consumers argued that the deception financially injured them because they had to pay more for a product for which they might have paid less if they had known its true storage capacity.

According to Judge Freeman, the front of the package listed the storage capacity in terms of gigabyte, for example, as “64 GB,” with an asterisk next to it. Allegedly, the asterisk is on the back of the package as well, noting that “1 GB = 1,000,000,000.” 

The judge determined that this labeling was sufficient to inform consumers about the true storage capacity of the devices. Judge Freeman said that “the disclosure is in fine print, but legible,” and notes that the consumers do not dispute the presence of the disclosure. 

In your experience, is it easy to determine the storage size when shopping for a memory card? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Dinan is represented by James Rosemergy, Paul Maddock and Francis J. Flynn Jr. of Carey Danis & Lowe. 

The SanDisk Memory Card Storage Size Class Action Lawsuit is John Dinan v. SanDisk LLC, Case No. 5:18-cv-05420-BLF, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

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14 thoughts onSanDisk Memory Card Class Action Dismissed

  1. N Robidoux says:

    This problem has existed almost forever in computers. General rule of thumb storage uses SI units (base 10), everything else uses JEDEC units (base 2; same abbreviations). Apparently no one wants to use the IEC units specific to binary… going on ~22 years now.

  2. Mickey Tumlin says:

    I have had SanDisk cause me to lose some of my data & information. Plz add me to your list!

  3. SHEMONE FULLILOVE says:

    Please add me.

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