Amazon has been hit with a potential class-action lawsuit for circumventing privacy settings of users on the Internet Explorer Web browser.
“For years, Amazon has been taking visitors’ personal information that it was not entitled to take,” Nicole Del Vecchio and Ariana Del Vecchio allege in their complaint against the online retailer, filed in US District Court in Seattle.
The suit alleges that Amazon circumvents privacy filters by “spoofing” the browser into classifying Amazon as a site that offers more protections than it actually does.
The lawsuit comes after researchers at Carnegie-Mellon published a study concluding that many Web sites thwart users’ privacy settings by providing erroneous information to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The lawsuit comes down to how the judge will perceive the misleading tactics. Amazon may not have violated consumer protection laws since the consumer is not directly ‘duped’ in the traditional sense. The court will have to decide if Amazon misrepresenting itself to a Web browser and ultimately the consumer in the same fashion is a deceptive practice.
The lawsuit also alleges that Amazon sold the Del Vecchios’ information to outside partners, but the evidence here doesn’t appear that strong.
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