Federal Court Allows CIPA Case Against Conde Nast to Continue
A federal court on Thursday allowed a California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) case against media company Conde Nast's use of tracking technology to continue, ruling that the plaintiff has provided enough evidence.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Privacy Daily provides accurate coverage of newsworthy developments in data protection legislation, regulation, litigation, and enforcement for privacy professionals responsible for ensuring effective organizational data privacy compliance.
Plaintiff Aaron Deivaprakash alleged that Conde violated CIPA's pen register provision when trackers were installed on his internet browser when he visited the media company's website.
Judge Rita Lin noted Conde argued that its trackers "do not record or decode any information" but rather "instruct users’ browsers to transmit the information" to third parties. However, that argument ignores the plaintiff's "explicit allegations" that they "also collect and store users’ information, including cookies which 'uniquely identify' each user."
Additionally, "Deivaprakash sufficiently alleges that he suffered an injury in the form of an invasion of privacy," as he "describes" how the trackers let third parties "generate profiles that reflect users’ geographic locations, incomes, and preferences, among other characteristics, and hinder users’ ability to remain anonymous as they browse the Internet."
The judge also ruled Conde is incorrect when it argues "that the trackers collect more than just dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information," and so fall outside the pen register definition.
The media company argued that "the third parties receive information affirmatively sent to them by users’ browsers (under instruction from the trackers), as opposed to information intercepted by the tracker," but it's "not clear how this argument implicates the pen register definition," Lin said.
Case 3:25-cv-04021 was originally filed in state court but is now in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.