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Non-signatory may not arbitrate privacy claims

Courts Arbitration Privacy/Cyber Risk & Data Security Class Action

Courts

On March 9, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied a global technology company’s motion to compel arbitration in a putative consumer privacy class action, ruling that the technology company is not party to a co-defendant telecommunications company’s terms and conditions, which require consumer disputes to be arbitrated. The proposed class alleged that the defendants “engaged in false, deceptive and materially misleading consumer-oriented conduct” in violation of state law “by ‘failing to disclose that its practice of recycling phone numbers linked to SIM cards, and selling those SIM cards to consumers without requiring prior users to manually disassociate their [] IDs from the phone numbers associated with the recycled SIM cards, did not protect the privacy of users’ data and confidential personal information.’” The defendants moved to compel arbitration based on arbitration provisions contained in the telecommunications company’s terms and conditions.

The court first reserved its decision on one of the plaintiff’s claims because there was an open question as to whether the plaintiff received a copy of the terms and conditions at the time the plaintiff purchased the SIM card. With respect to the other plaintiff’s sole claims against the technology company, the court ruled that the technology company cannot enforce an agreement to which it is not a party. “This general rule stems from the principle that arbitration is a matter of consent, since ‘no party may be forced to submit a dispute to arbitration that the party did not intend and agree to arbitrate,’” the court said. The court also ruled, among other things, that the plaintiff’s claims “do not allege any interdependent or concerted misconduct by” the defendants, and as such they are not so entangled that the plaintiff must arbitrate his claims against the non-signatory technology company.