Class Action Lawsuit Alleges Best Buy Sells Customer Info to Third Parties Without Consent

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Best Buy collects consumers’ personally identifying information at its retail stores and sells the data to third parties without notice or consent for targeted advertising purposes.

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The 25-page lawsuit alleges that Best Buy, through its retail media network Best Buy Ads, “profits handsomely” from selling consumers’ personal information—including names, email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and purchase histories— via LiveRamp, a “data clean room” used to store and “enhance” customer data collected by the retailer.

According to the lawsuit, the LiveRamp data clean room, purportedly a more “privacy-centric” way for brands to share advertisers’ consumer data, pseudonymizes and adds a unique customer ID for each consumer and then organizes the information to create enhanced customer profiles. With these profiles, brands such as Best Buy can deploy targeted advertisements “more precisely” while providing “highly specific customer data” to other brands that partner with Best Buy Ads, the case explains.

The class action lawsuit alleges that Best Buy sells and profits from customer data without notice, as required by the Virginia Personal Information Privacy Act (VPIPA).

The filing states that the Federal Trade Commission has warned that data clean rooms such as LiveRamp do not automatically preclude the “impermissible disclosure” of consumer information, and still risk violating consumer privacy rights. The case says that data clean rooms increasingly attempt to “appease” consumers’ privacy concerns by “pitching” ostensibly privacy-safe advertising techniques, though the lawsuit says this often amounts to little more than “privacy washing.”

“Despite these lofty ambitions of protecting customers’ personal data, [data clean rooms] are not the consumer privacy silver bullet that they claim to be,” the case states.

Per the complaint, “from the moment a customer interacts with Best Buy on any platform,” the company begins building a unique and “comprehensive” customer profile. Despite LiveRamp’s purported privacy benefits, the suit says that the “extremely valuable” consumer information stored in LiveRamp’s data clean room is not anonymized.

Even in cases where consumer information passes through a data clean room, the unauthorized sale of customers’ personal information “does not alleviate this privacy violation,” the suit emphasizes.

The privacy lawsuit adds that “there is no debate” that the digital advertising market for consumer data is “massive,” with many companies paying billions of dollars for access. Best Buy continues to profit from brands’ willingness to pay premium prices for this information “at the expense of its customers’ statutory privacy rights,” the filing alleges.

The Best Buy class action lawsuit looks to cover all individuals in the United States whose personally identifying information was shared by Best Buy with a third-party data clean room and then sold to other third parties through Best Buy Ads during the relevant time period.

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