From: Bloomberg
By Linda Sandler
The world’s biggest Web companies are lining up at the courtroom of a California federal judge whose rulings could further inflame the widening debate over online privacy and how the Internet giants use personal data.
Google Inc., LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) are all being sued by customers who say the companies unfairly appropriated their personal information for profit. The lawsuits have landed before U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose, who in September rattled Google — and became a hero to some privacy advocates — when she said the company wasn’t disclosing clearly enough its plans for the user information it harvests.
At issue in the suits is consent: Are users who check off on online companies’ click-to-agree screens, or have access to their privacy policies and opt-out buttons, given an explicit enough picture of providers’ plans?
The answer is no, according to plaintiffs in several complaints before Koh that threaten to upend how the companies monetize user data for the online advertising market that generated more than $40 billion in the U.S. last year. These people allege that even if they clicked an online agreement button, they didn’t sign off on letting the Web companies read their e-mails, use their photos or access their personal address books.
Koh, in overseeing cases against Google as well as Facebook Inc. (FB), has broken from how other courts have handled allegations of online privacy violations. Judges have dismissed many such complaints, saying customers hadn’t proved they had been harmed and had agreed to online contracts. Koh, by contrast, is giving the fullest courtroom interpretations yet of when these companies may be acting without consent.
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