Seamless Subscriptions Use of Names and Personas California Class Action

Seamless Contacts, Inc. operates a website, www.seamless.ai, that it touts as an “unlimited lead-generating machine!” But the complaint for this class action alleges that the company uses the “profiles and personas” of unrelated persons to advertise its services and subscription plans, without their permission. The complaint brings suit against Seamless, claiming, “California law recognizes individual’s intellectual property and privacy rights in controlling the use of their names, photographs, likenesses, and personas for commercial purposes.”

The class for this action is all current and former California residents who are not subscribers of Seamless and whose names and personal information Seamless incorporated in profiles used to promote paid subscriptions.

Seamless offers subscribers a number of services, including, according to the complaint, “Real-Time Alerts” that tell subscribers when people change jobs; the ability to “Find Millions of B2B Contacts” along with “Real-Time Researched Contact Information”; information integration with customer relationship management (CRM); and “Data Enrichment” to get additional information on existing sales prospects.”

It offers website visitors a trial user program with a limited number of “credits” they can use to search for a limited number of profiles. When a user searches for a person, they are able to see and download that person’s personal information, the complaint says. A counter also shows the number of free credits left and a button for the user to Upgrade to a paid subscription.

According to the complaint, “Seamless uses … profiles and personas to advertise three paid subscription plans”—Basic, Pro, and Enterprise—depending on how many views and downloads they wish to make per month or day.

The plaintiff in this case, Doug Spindler, claims that Seamless has his information on file and uses it to help sell its subscriptions. The complaint asserts that Spindler “does not know how Seamless obtained his name, contact information, job title, place of work, and city of residence.”

The fact that Seamless has been able to find and appropriate information on a person is not the same as permission to use that information.

The complaint claims, “Consent is not all or nothing. … For example, Plaintiff or Class Members may have consented to the posting of their names, work histories, and photographs on the website of a company for which they work, or on a professional networking site.” Even so, the complaint alleges, they “did not consent to the commercial use of their personal information and personas to promote the subscriptions to a website with which they have no relationship, and which they have no interest in promoting.”

The complaint claims that Spindler and others whose information and names are on the site “have an economic interest in their personas, which Seamless has stolen, and a privacy interest in their personas, which Seamless has violated.”

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Use of Identity for Advertising, Using Your Picture For Commercial Gain, Your Privacy