On Monday a federal judge rejected a motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit filed against social media firm LinkedIn. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ claim of personal data having been shared by LinkedIn was substantial and no permission was granted for that data sharing to occur.
The lead plaintiff in the class action suit, Courtney Cole, asserts that LinkedIn intentionally used embedded code to transmit the data of users via Facebook Tracking Pixel. This personal information ended up in the hands of third parties like Adobe and Facebook, which is a violation of the VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act).
While denying the motion to dismiss, Judge Casey Pitts wrote that Cole had provided reasonable grounds for her claim that the recipient of the data transmitted through the embedded code could identify who had watched which particular video on LinkedIn’s video platform. The judge added that the plaintiff’s Facebook ID together with URLs of video’s she had watched on LinkedIn could easily be paired through the embedded code and therefore third-parties could easily identify the person that had watched a given video.
In the lawsuit, Cole says she subscribed to join LinkedIn Learning and says that the video platform had cookies from third-parties, particularly Facebook, and those cookies transmitted data on what videos she watched on the LinkedIn program.
Counsel for LinkedIn sought to have the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the viewing history of the plaintiffs was transmitted alongside other voluminous kinds of data making it impractical for an ordinary person to work through all that data in order to identify a given plaintiff. The judge didn’t buy this argument and dismissed the motion filed by LinkedIn’s legal team.
The judge observed that the Ninth Circuit had previously ruled that the VPPA was premised on the content in the data, such as whether an individual’s history of videos watched could be positively identified as relating to that particular individual, rather than how that data was disclosed.
Pitts further noted in his ruling that the argument LinkedIn was making in their motion wasn’t connected to the specifics of the complaint filed. He added that their arguments are better suited for another kind of motion, such as one seeking summary judgment.
As the use of AI continues to grow, concerns about data privacy are taking center stage, and it remains to be seen how entities like Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), which owns Facebook and other social media platforms, will address these concerns and assure the public that their data isn’t being harvested and used without their consent.
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