Chevrolet, Dodge, Others Facing Class Actions Over Alleged Web Chat Wiretapping

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Three California residents have filed several proposed class action lawsuits in which they accuse certain automakers and retailers of allowing third parties to wiretap the online chat interactions of website visitors without consent.

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Three complaints allege the General Motors Company, FCA US and Nissan North America—which do business as Chevrolet, Dodge and Infiniti, respectively—have secretly embedded into the chat features of Chevrolet.com, Dodge.com and InfinitiUSA.com third-party software that records and transcribes in real-time the private chat conversations of “unsuspecting website visitors.”

Two other cases claim JCPenney and exercise equipment maker iFit, which operates as NordicTrack, have similarly wiretapped the chat functions found on JCPenney.com and NordicTrack.com without consent, in violation of California privacy law.

In particular, the chat features of Dodge.com, InfinitiUSA.com and NordicTrack.com utilize code provided by third party Salesforce to intercept, analyze and store transcripts of users’ communications, regardless of whether the conversations are “private and deeply personal,” the suits claim. The other cases explain that the Chevrolet and JCPenney websites do the same with software provided by third parties LivePerson.net and Vergic, respectively.

Because the third parties operate the chat services at issue from their own servers, any message sent through one of the defendants’ online chat functions is first routed through the outside company’s system, the complaints relay. This allows the third party to create real-time transcripts of consumer communications, which can then be “exhaustively analyzed” alongside other data that the software has captured about a user, the filings contend.

Two of the lawsuits claim that third-party codes provided by LivePerson.net and Vergic collect and sort visitors’ personal information to create user profiles based on chat conversations, searched content and browser activity. Similarly, Salesforce’s software records and transcribes detailed information, including a visitor’s name, geographic location, network or internet service provider, IP address, chat message data and timestamps, the previous website visited and more, the suits allege.

What’s more, the third-party codes embedded into the defendants’ websites can also link an individual’s latest chat transcript to previous records of conversations, the cases charge.

Per the lawsuits, the vast amount of information intercepted and stored by the third parties is not necessary for standard business operations but is, in fact, used for little more than commercial purposes and financial gain.

“Visitors would be shocked and appalled to know that [the defendants] secretly record[] those conversations and allow[] a third party to secretly eavesdrop … in real time under the guise of ‘data analytics,’” the similarly worded complaints note.

At no time during their visits to the defendants’ websites were the plaintiffs informed that the companies were allowing third parties to wiretap their chat communications, nor did the consumers consent to any such recording, the filings stress.

The lawsuits look to represent anyone residing in California who, during the statute of limitations period, communicated with any of the defendants via the chat feature on their respective websites and whose communications were recorded in real time by LivePerson.net, Salesforce, Vergic or any other third party without prior consent.

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