Web design & marketing tips by Ironpaper

Web tracking lawsuit takes shape against AOL, Spotify, Spokeo and others

Written by Ironpaper | Aug 4, 2011 2:51:42 AM

More than 20 customers of the website analytics firm KISSmetrics are being sued because allegedly the KISSmetrics web tracking technology violats federal and state privacy laws. The lawsuit is driving for class-action status and unspecified damages--it was filed in The US District Court of Northern California.

Basically the concern is that the web tracking technology was designed to track users who have deleted their cookies. The technology uses Flash, Silverlight, HTML5 and ETags in cached browser files to discover unique identifiers. In order to not be tracked, users would have to set an opt-out cookie, which is a new policy for KISSmetrics (as of this past weekend).