Forbes to settle class action privacy claim over website trackers

Top of Forbes.com homepage, and bottom showing privacy consent choices (as seen by UK users)

Forbes has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit in California relating to its use of third-party website trackers.

The trackers on Forbes.com collected IP addresses and other unique identifiers from visitors, which those bringing the lawsuit argued constituted unauthorised use of “pen registers” and “trap and trace devices” under the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

A “pen register” is a “device or process that records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information” while a “trap and trace device” is one that captures incoming information that can “identify the originating number or other dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information reasonably likely to identify the source of a wire or electronic communication, but not the contents of a communication”.

The two plaintiffs, who brought the case on their behalf and others who may have been similarly affected, accused Forbes of installing trackers on its website including the Linkedin Insight Tag, the Bing Universal Event Tracking Tag and the Adnx Tracker, all ultimately owned by Microsoft.

They alleged that Forbes used trackers to collect and send IP addresses and other unique identifiers, without obtaining consent, to Linkedin, Microsoft and other undisclosed third parties.

Those third parties then “feed this data into large databases to compile and use information about specific users’ browsing and shopping habits across the internet”.

The plaintiffs claimed this “allows Forbes and others to optimise targeted advertising campaigns and provide website and advertising analytics at the cost of depriving ordinary internet users of control over their private internet activity”.

After “fruitful” settlement discussions, Forbes has agreed to create a…

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