Rite Aid No-Consent Wiretapping of Website Visitors Class Action

Rite Aid Corporation maintains the website www.riteaid.com. But the complaint for this class action alleges that Rite Aid wiretaps all communications that take place with visitors to its website, which the complaint alleges is illegal under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

The class for this action is all persons in California who (1) between August 4, 2021 and August 4, 2022 visited Rite Aid’s website, and (2) whose electronic communications were caused to be intercepted, recorded, and/or monitored by Rite Aid without their prior consent.

The complaint alleges that Rite Aid has installed keystroke monitoring software on its website “to surreptitiously intercept, monitor, and record the communications (including keystrokes and mouse clicks)” of any visitor to the website. These various actions and communications can later be replayed.

In addition, the complaint claims, visitor may communicate with someone they believe to be a representative of the company but which is actually a “chatbot” program that can imitate a human being. This chatbot, the complaint alleges, “encourages consumers to share their personal information. At the same time, [Rite Aid] simultaneously logs, records and stores the entire conversation using secretly embedded wiretapping technology.”

It does all this, the complaint asserts, without ever telling visitors what is happening and without ever gaining their consent.

The replay and chatbot programs, the complaint alleges, were provided by others who create and license this kind of technology. Also, the complaint claims that Rite Aid also “routinely shares the contents of the wiretapped communications” with these parties “for both storage an[d] data harvesting purposes.”

According to the complaint, Rite Aid’s “actions amount to the digital trifecta of looking over its consumers’ shoulders, eavesdropping on consumers’ conversations, [and] reading consumers’ journals.” It calls this behavior “both illegal and offensive[.]”

The complaint refers to a study recently conducted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which the complaint calls “a respected thought leader regarding digital privacy[.]” Two of the major findings of that study, the complaint alleges, were that “(1) nearly 9 in 10 adults are ‘very concerned’ about data privacy, and (2) 75% of adults are unaware of the extent to which companies gather, store, and exploit their personal data.”

Quoted in the complaint is CIPA, part of the California Penal Code, which forbids wiretapping or making an unauthorized connection with wires or communication systems, without the consent of all parties to the communication, and also forbids using the information obtained in that way as well as assisting or conspiring with any person to do the things forbidden by this law.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Invasion of Privacy, Your Privacy, wiretapping