Promises Behavioral Health Internet Chat Wiretapping California Class Action

Promises Behavioral Health, LLC maintains a website that the complaint for this class action claims wiretaps visitors through “keystroke monitoring” software that, unknown to visitors, intercepts, monitors, and records communications they participate in through the chat function of the website. The complaint alleges that this violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) because Promises does not get visitors’ consent to the interception or recording of their communications.

The class for this action is all persons in California who, between August 16, 2021 and August 16, 2022, (1) visited the Promises website, and (2) whose electronic communications were intercepted, recorded, monitored, or shared by Promises without the person’s prior express consent.

“Unbeknownst to website visitors,” the complaint alleges, the Promises “chat platform creates and stores a transcript of every chat conversation using secretly embedded wiretapping technology. The transcript is an exact copy of every conversation between any website visitor and the [Promises] agent.”

The complaint alleges that the software is “secretly embedded” in the website and stores all details of the communication, including details about the visitor and the time of the communication. But that’s not all. The complaint alleges that the “record (including the transcript) of every such chat is automatically sent to and shared with a third party for backup and storage purposes.” These transcripts are not private; they are “available to any credentialed user.”

Promises does not get the consent of visitors to intercept, monitor, or record their communications, the complaint alleges; in fact, it claims, visitors are not even aware that their communications are being recorded.

According to the complaint, the company’s “actions amount to the digital trifecta of looking over consumers’ shoulders, eavesdropping on their conversations, and reading their journals.” It calls this conduct “both illegal and offensive…”

The complaint quotes CIPA as prohibiting entities from, among other things, “willfully and without the consent of all parties to the communication, or in any unauthorized manner, reads, or attempts to read, or to learn the contents or meaning of any message, report, or communication, while the same is in transit or passing over any wire, line, or cable or is being sent from, or received at any place within this state…”

CIPA’s prohibitions specifically apply to Internet communications as well as to telephone calls or other kind of communications. The complaint quotes an earlier court case as saying, “It makes liable anyone who ‘reads, or attempts to read, or to learn the contents’ of a communication ‘without the consent of all parties to the communication.’”

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: CIPA, Recording Electronic Communications Without Consent, Your Privacy, wiretapping