Know the Law: Why Are California Lawyers Suing New Hampshire Businesses?

Q: Why Are California Lawyers Suing New Hampshire Businesses?

A: You likely use tracking plugins on your website, like Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, or LinkedIn Insight. These technologies help you analyze visitor activity and advertise on social media and Internet browsers. If so, you may find yourself sued by California plaintiff lawyers under the California Invasion of Privacy Act, or CIPA.

CIPA is a wiretap law intended to prevent interception of electronic communications, and requires consent for such activity. California plaintiff lawyers claim that tracking plugins violate CIPA by intercepting electronic communications between a website and a visitor to the site, such as clicks, page views, and keystrokes, and transmitting that data to plugin providers. Even if the website operator cannot identify its visitors, the provider can do so using data from a cookie that it previously placed on the devices of website visitors.

California plaintiff lawyers do not sue Meta, Google or LinkedIn. Doing so would pick a fight with an enormous adversary, involve expensive litigation, and potentially end in a court ruling that CIPA does not apply. Such a ruling would end the gravy train.

Instead, these lawyers find a California resident who has visited websites of small and medium sized businesses, and assert claims against them for aiding and abetting CIPA violations. The lawyers seek statutory damages of $5,000 per website visit by the California resident, resulting in demands of less than $100,000 and settlements of 10-25% of the initial demand. For such a business, settling a claim is far cheaper than litigating it.

What can you do to avoid being targeted?

• Audit your website to determine if you use tracking plugins.
• Update your privacy policy to state that your website uses tracking technology that forwards information about visitors to third parties, such as Meta, Google or LinkedIn, and that they may use that information to advertise to those individuals.
• Reset your cookie banner to require all website visitors the next time they visit your site to reject all, accept all, or select which cookies they permit on your site.
• Do not transmit information to tracking technology providers unless and until a website visitor has consented to such plugins via the cookie banner.
• Honor privacy rights requests of your website visitors, including their right to limit how your businesses uses their personal information.

California plaintiff lawyers are relentless, targeting unaware businesses with CIPA claims to leverage settlements. Take action now to ensure that you are not their next target.