Glassdoor Seeks Dismissal of Email Address Leak Class Action

Job recruitment and review site Glassdoor asked a California federal court to dismiss a putative class action lawsuit alleging the company leaked email addresses of 600,000 anonymous users, on the grounds that the plaintiff failed to meet the Supreme Court’s Spokeo standard of injury in fact suffered from the email leak.

Specifically, Glassdoor points out that since filing this lawsuit, plaintiff Melissa Levine and her counsel have publicized her identity and her membership on Glassdoor.

Through various media interviews, social media posts, and press coverage, Levine has publicly identified herself and her Glassdoor membership.

Under Spokeo, an “injury in fact” requires both a “concrete” and a “particularized” harm, which must be “actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.”

The company argued in its dismissal bid that “but for her filing this lawsuit and alerting the press, it is not plausible that anyone would have known that she was a Glassdoor member based on the pseudonymous email address included in one limited-circulation email or that any of the other recipients would have had an incentive to try to de-anonymize her email address to figure out who she was. Nor does she allege that anyone tried to do so.”

Glassdoor.com is a website where employees and former employees can anonymously review companies and their management.

The company has over 30 million users from 190 countries and in order to become a Glassdoor user, an individual is required to provide a valid email address.

On Aug. 1, Levine, a Los Angeles-based television researcher, filed the class action lawsuit against Glassdoor, claiming the employment review site violated state law by including her email address in the CC field and exposed her to potential retribution from her former employers.

The leak occurred when Glassdoor sent out a new terms of service to its users. Instead of copying them blindly, each email showed the addresses of 999 other recipients, the complaint says. Glassdoor said the mistake exposed the email addresses of about two percent of its user base.

Levine’s lawsuit emphasized that the company went to great lengths to characterize itself as creating an “anonymous community” where users can freely express their views about their current and former workplaces.

According to the complaint, Glassdoor violated the privacy rights of its members, who value their anonymity as they are encouraged to talk about potentially sensitive job details and don’t want to suffer retaliation.

However, Glassdoor says Levine failed to provide actual proof she suffered any retaliation or any repercussions as a result of her pseudonymous email address included in the Glassdoor message.

Instead, according to motion to dismiss, Levine only speculates her injuries based on hypothetical future events.

“Rather, she points to the [implausible] possibility of future harm — namely, that an employer or co-worker could learn of Levine’s Glassdoor membership, somehow identify one of her anonymous posts, and take some negative action, even though she offers no basis to believe any co-workers or actual or potential employers were recipients of this single private email message or that any of the other recipients would have had any incentive to figure out who she, among the other 999 recipients, might be,” Glassdoor states.

The Glassdoor email leak class action lawsuit alleges violations of the Federal Stored Communications Act, which it says bars the kinds of disclosures that Glassdoor committed, as well as general privacy and negligence violations.

The plaintiff seeks damages for all of the users who as a result of the leak suffered “harm to their interest in privacy, mental distress in the form of severe anxiety, embarrassment and fear for their jobs.”

Levine is represented by Mark J. Geragos, Ben Meiselas and Mark Bolin of Geragos & Geragos PC.

The Glassdoor Privacy Rights Class Action Lawsuit is Levine v. Glassdoor Inc., Case No. 2:16-cv-05696, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

UPDATE: On Nov. 10, 2016, Levine fought Glassdoor’s dismissal bid claiming that the job review website was negligent and potential Class Members were harmed by the email address leak.