Barnes & Noble Class Action Says Purchase Info Shared on Social Media

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A Florida woman claims Barnes & Noble violates its customers’ privacy and applicable law by sharing video purchase data with social media websites.

Plaintiff Melina Bernardino says defendant Barnes and Noble Bookstores Inc. has been relaying information about customers’ video purchases to the company’s social media partners, without those customers’ knowledge or consent.

She argues this practice violates federal and state laws that forbid the sharing of information about video purchases without permission.

Bernardino says that retailers like Barnes & Noble use social media plugins on their websites, and they encourage customers to use these plugins to share information about their favorite products with their connections on social media. Barnes & Noble uses plugins from its social media partners Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.

But even if customers do not use these plugins, Bernardino claims, Barnes & Noble still shares information about their video purchases with these social media partners.

According to Bernardino, she purchased a DVD online from Barnes & Noble in February 2017. She made the purchase specifically through the Barnes & Noble retail website and not through Facebook, though she was logged into Facebook at the time of the purchase.

Barnes & Noble then sent Facebook information about the purchase, she claims, including the title of the DVD and the price she paid. That information also included her IP address, her Facebook fr cookie (an encrypted combination of her user ID and browser ID), and information about the smartphone she made the purchase from, including geolocation and her phone number.

Bernardino says she never gave Barnes & Noble permission to share this information with Facebook, and that she was never given an opportunity to offer such permission.

She alleges Barnes & Noble’s privacy policy used to guarantee visitors to its website that none of their information would be shared with social media websites, but that language was removed from the policy in August 2016.

In her Barnes & Noble class action lawsuit, Bernardino is raising claims under the federal Video Privacy Protection Act and the New York State Video Consumer Privacy Act. Both of these statutes prohibit the disclosure of a person’s personally-identifiable video purchase records to a third party without their express written consent.

Terms of these acts require consent to be given in a separate, stand-alone consent form, Bernardino says. Contrary to this requirement, she claims, Barnes & Noble does not get any consent from its customers before sharing their video purchase information.

Bernardino proposes to represent a plaintiff Class consisting of all Facebook subscribers in the U.S. who purchased DVDs or other video media from Barnes & Noble online store. She expects Class Members to number in the thousands.

She seeks an award of compensatory, statutory and punitive damages for herself and each Class Member, restitution, court costs and attorneys’ fees. She is also asking the court to permanently restrain Barnes & Noble from the activity complained of and from otherwise violating its customers’ privacy.

Bernardino is represented by David Straite, Frederic S. Fox, Joel B. Strauss, Laurence D. King and Matthew George of Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer LLP, Jay Barnes of Barnes & Associates, Barry R. Eichen and Evan J. Rosenberg of Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow & McElroy, and Marc Wites of Wites & Kapetan PA.

The Barnes & Noble Video Purchase Data Sharing Class Action Lawsuit is Melina Bernardino v. Barnes & Noble Booksellers Inc., Case No. 1:17-cv-04570, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.