2023 ANA Masters of Advertising Law Conference

Jason Stiehl will moderate the breakout session "Third-Party Wiretapping, VPPA, and Deanonymization Litigation: A Moving Target for Brands" at the 2023 ANA Masters of Advertising Law Conference.

While California has always been a hotbed of privacy-related litigation, in the past year, a group of creative Plaintiff’s counsel have spawned dozens of lawsuits related to website functionality related privacy claims. The first wave focused on claims that certain “pixels” were placed within the source-code of websites that allowed companies to collect data related to users of their websites. These were closely followed by a second wave, focusing on the use of chat functionality to similarly gather data about customers visiting a website. The most recent wave combines these theories with an alleged “dark web” motive; i.e., the use of tools also present in the source code of websites to deanonymize a websites visitors. The litigation is industry agnostic and efforts to defeat these cases at an early stage have been a mixed bag. We will discuss some of the trends in these cases, the successful and unsuccessful defenses, and best practices to avoid being the next target.