Amazon.com Flash Cookie Class Action Lawsuit

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Amazon.com Flash Cookie Class Action Lawsuit

By Mike Holter

Amazon.com has been hit with a class action lawsuit for fraudulently circumventing users’ Web-browser privacy settings to collect personal information without their permission and sharing it with other companies.
 
The Amazon.com class action lawsuit accuses the online retailer of tricking Microsoft’s Internet Explorer into thinking the e-commerce site is “more privacy-protective than it actually is,” and using a clever work-around – Flash cookies – to collect users’ personal information even if they have set their browser to block it. The class action alleges Amazon knowingly and fraudulently set up its website to spoof Internet Explorer, and purposefully misleads customers in its privacy policy published online.
 
“For years, Amazon has been taking visitors’ personal information that it was not entitled to take. It does so by misusing privacy-protection software on users’ own computers, bending the software to Amazon’s purpose of collecting more personal information than it had a right to collect or that users have given it consent to collect,” the class action states.
 
Companies using Flash cookies to circumvent users’ privacy setting and collect personal information without permission have been the root of several class action lawsuits lately (see “Interclick Class Action Lawsuit” and “Quantcast & Clearspring Class Action Settlement“). Many of these companies, however, are ad networks, not e-commerce sites.
 
“Amazon claims in its privacy notice that it does not share users’ information with third parties for advertising purposes and that, instead, it delivers third parties’ advertisements on their behalf,” the class action says. “In fact, Amazon share users’ personal identification information with third parties for those third parties’ independent use and does not disclose this fact to consumers.”
 
The Amazon.com Flash cookie class action lawsuit is brought on behalf of anyone who has used Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 or 8 – with high privacy settings – to visit Amazon.com to purchase products there. It is seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages, which could potentially be shared by millions of consumers.

Updated March 6th, 2011

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