Uniqlo Wiretaps, Eavesdrops on Website Visitors California CIPA Class Action

Uniqlo USA, LLC maintains a website, www.uniqlo.com, which has a chat feature that allows visitors to talk to representatives. But the complaint for this class action alleges that the company wiretaps all website visitor communications with this chat feature, and allows the harvesting of data from it, in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

The class for this action is all persons in California who, within the statute of limitations period, (1) communicated with Uniqlo via the chat feature on the company’s website using telephony, subject to California’s Penal Code Section 632.7, and (2) whose communications were recorded or eavesdropped on without their prior consent.

CIPA, the complaint alleges, forbids both wiretapping communications and eavesdropping on them, unless all parties to the communication give their consent. The complaint alleges, “Compliance with CIPA is easy, and the vast majority of website operators comply by conspicuously warning visitors if their conversations are being recorded or if third parties are eavesdropping on them.”

Uniqlo’s website does its wiretapping and eavesdropping, the complaint claims, by embedding code into its chat feature that creates transcripts of all conversations, and “allows at least one independent third[ ]party (on information and belief, ‘Salesforce Live Chat’ and/or ‘LivePerson LiveChat’) to secretly intercept in real time, eavesdrop upon, and store transcripts of [Uniqlo’s] chat communications with unsuspecting website visitors—even when such conversations are private and deeply personal.”

According to the complaint, although the law was originally written to apply to wiretapping telephone conversations, it also applies to Internet communications. “By definition,” the complaint alleges, Uniqlo’s “chat communications from its website are transmitted to website visitors by either cellular telephony or landline telephony.”

What does it do with the information it gleans in this way? The complaint alleges that it does it “to harvest data for financial gain.” The complaint quotes an industry expert as saying, “Live chat transcripts are the gold mines of customer service. At your fingertips, you have valuable customer insight to make informed business decisions… When people are chatting, you have direct access to their exact pain points.”

The complaint asserts that Uniqlo does not get visitors’ consent to the wiretapping or eavesdropping. The complaint calls this practice “illegal” and “offensive,” and says that these actions “are not incidental to the act of facilitating e-commerce, nor are they undertaken in the ordinary course of business. To the contrary … [Uniqlo’s] actions are contrary to industry norms and the legitimate expectations of consumers.”

It alleges that website visitors would be “shocked and appalled to know that [Uniqlo] secretly records those conversations and allows a third party to eavesdrop on them in real time under the guise of ‘data analytics.’”

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: CIPA, Your Privacy, wiretapping