District Court grants defendant’s motion for summary judgment in data collection suit

Courts Data Privacy Data Collection / Aggregation

On December 12, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted a defendant’s motion for summary judgment in a suit alleging that it collected consumers’ data without first obtaining their consent. According to the opinion, the plaintiffs are users of the defendant’s browser who alleged that they chose not to sync their browsers with the defendant’s accounts while browsing the web from July 2016 to the present. The complaint further noted that the browser’s sync feature permits “users to store their personal information by logging into the browser with their [defendant’s] account.” The district court granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment after determining that most of the issues are “browser agnostic” rather than specific to the browser. Furthermore, the district court determined that because those issues are not specific to the browser, the defendant’s general privacy policies “governs the collection of those categories of information identified by plaintiffs.” The district court also found that “a reasonable person viewing those disclosures would understand that [the defendant] maintains the practices of collecting its users' data when users use [the defendant’s] services or third-party sites that use [the defendant’s] services and that [the defendant] uses the data for advertising purposes.” The district court also noted that “a reasonable user reviewing these same disclosures would understand that [the defendant] combines and links this information across sites and services for targeted advertising purposes.”