Santa Clara, CA: UnrollMe Inc, a web service company, and its parent Slice Technologies Inc, are facing a privacy class action lawsuit over allegations it sold customer data to third parties, including Uber, without those customers' knowledge or consent.
The lawsuit contends that UnrollMe allows users to unsubscribe from mailing lists and newsletters, but scans those customers’ emails and inboxes to procure data and sell that data on for profit.
Filed in California federal court by Michigan resident Jason Cooper, on behalf of a proposed class of UnrollMe users, the suit asserts violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Stored Communications Act.
“What consumers don’t know — and what defendants have thus far successfully obfuscated — is that by giving UnrollMe access to their emails for the limited purpose of unsubscribing from spam, they have let the fox into the henhouse,” the complaint states. “By convincing consumers to trust UnrollMe, Slice was able to gain access to millions of consumers’ private emails, from which it analyzes, collects, and sells information to third parties.”
A recent article in the New York Times exposed the practices of UnrollMe, which was launched in 2011 and subsequently purchased by Slice in 2014. The NY Times article reveals that Uber purchased data relating to UnrollMe consumers whose emails indicated they use competitor app Lyft.
The NY Times article prompted a UnrollMe CEO Jojo Hedaya to write a blog post that expressed regret the company wasn’t “explicit enough” about how it “monetize[s] our free service.”
According to UnrollMe, it does ask users for permission to access their email accounts for the sake of identifying new subscriptions and other mailing lists from which users want to be removed. The company also maintains a privacy policy stating that it “may collect, use, transfer, sell and disclose non-personal information for any purpose” and that it “may collect and use your commercial transactional messages and associated data to build anonymous market research products and services with trusted business partners.”
However, according to the complaint, these disclosures don’t go far enough and don't agree with the company’s main marketing message to consumers that it is mainly a web service that unsubscribes users from mailing lists. Consumers, they contend, were unwitting participants in a data mining service from which UnrollMe profited, the suit states.
Hedaya states in his blog post, “We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only.” He pledged that UnrollMe will provide “clearer messaging” on its website and app to better disclose this aspect of its business practice. However, the lawsuit states that, “Time and time again, researchers have revealed the ease in which they can identify particular people from purportedly anonymized data sources. This is particularly easy to accomplish when the dataset is taxi trips, like the Lyft data defendants sold.”
The plaintiffs seeks an injunction to block UnrollMe and Slice from any unlawful practice tied to selling consumers’ data and for damages as high as $1,000 per class member.
The plaintiffs are represented by Nina Eisenberg of Edelson PC. The case is Jason Cooper v. Slice Technologies Inc. et al., case number 3:17-cv-02340, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
