Hemmings Motor News Subscriber Information Sharing Michigan Class Action

The complaint for this class action alleges that American City Business Journals, Inc. (ACBJ) shares information about subscribers to its Hemmings Motor News magazine with data aggregators, data cooperatives, and list brokers. According to the complaint, this disclosure of Private Reading Information violates Michigan’s Preservation of Personal Privacy Act (PPPA), at least before the PPPA was amended in 2016.

The class for this action is all Michigan residents who, at any point during the relevant pre-July 31, 2016 period, had their Private Reading Information disclosed to third parties by ACBJ without their consent. (The PPPA was amended in 2016, and the class period does not include the time after it law was amended.)

The complaint quotes the PPPA as saying, “[A] person, or an employee or agent of the person, engaged in the business of selling at retail, renting, or lending books or other written materials … shall not disclose to any person, other than the customer, a record or information concerning any purchase or information concerning the purchase … of those materials by a customer that indicates the identity of the customer.”

How do we know that ACBJ discloses this information? The complaint reproduces a screenshot from the website of NextMark, Inc., a list broker, offering rentals of the Hemmings Publishing Masterfile Mailing List, for subscribers to the car magazine, at a base price of $115 per thousand.

This information can be rented to or exchanged with any party who can pay for it, on what the complaint calls “an open and largely unregulated market.” The complaint alleges that this is a problem when it is shared with direct-mail advertisers: “In addition to causing waste and inconvenience, direct-mail advertisers often use consumer information to lure unsuspecting consumers into various scams, including fraudulent sweepstakes, charities, and buying clubs.”

These, the complaint claims, may include thieves and those who target the elderly. It quotes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as saying that “[t]he elderly often are the deliberate targets of fraudulent telemarketers who take advantage of the fact that many older people have cash reserves or other assets to spend on seemingly attractive offers.”

The complaint alleges, “ACBJ does not seek its customers’ prior consent, written or otherwise, to any of these disclosures and its customers remain unaware that their Private Reading Information and other sensitive information is being rented and exchanged on the open market.”

Consumers can subscribe to the magazine through a number of outlets, but the complaint alleges that, during the subscription process, they are never asked to read or agree to any information-sharing conditions. It claims that ACBJ therefore does not have the consent of its subscribers to share their information.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Sharing Personal Information with Third Parties, Using Your Private Information Without Consent, Your Privacy