Is Your Web Site Breaking the Law?

Websites often collect data from their website to fix bugs and improve the “user experience”.

However, just because something might be helpful to a website owner, doesn’t mean it is legal. Especially if you are not fully disclosing what you are doing and, in some states, not unless you give users the ability to easily opt out of it.

According to the attorneys at Alston & Bird, examples of lawsuits against website owners include:

• Claims that session replay and chatbots violate state wiretapping laws
• The video privacy protection act (remember when you used to rent videotapes at Blockbuster) has been applied to website videos
• Biometric data collection lawsuits have expanded beyond Illinois to states like California and Texas

If your company is capturing user sessions, has a chat feature, tracks who watches which videos or collects biometric data, you are at risk of a class action lawsuit. Alston & Bird says that the risk is real and the number of lawsuits and arbitrations is growing. Among the laws in play are the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the federal Video Privacy Protection Act.

Many companies use “session replay”, where the company can recreate every mouse movement, every click and every keystroke you type. While this can be useful to the company and may, possibly, be useful to you, it may also be illegal and put you at risk of being the target of a class action lawsuit.

And, even if you win, you lose in the court of public opinion and in your checkbook. Defending yourself could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is definitely still quicksand in the legal system with changing standards all the time, but, like the other kind of quicksand, it is still very dangerous.

And, if you are using a third party vendor to provide you with this tech, they can be and have been dragged into these class actions. In these cases, who gets to pay? Do you pay the vendor’s legal bills? Does the vendor pay yours? Or what?

In recent months more than 75 lawsuits have been filed against companies using chatbots operated by vendors for the companies. Eventually these will be settled, but it will take years.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t use these and other features, it just means that you have to be careful and make sure that you have the correct disclosures. Credit: Alston & Bird

While we are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice, if you have questions, please contact us.

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