Coca-Cola Disregards Website Visitors’ Cookie Preferences, Class Action Lawsuit Alleges

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that The Coca-Cola Company ignores California consumers’ online privacy preferences by allowing third-party tracking technologies embedded in its website and those of its stable of brands to track, collect, and share visitors’ data without consent and regardless of their cookie preferences.

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The 103-page lawsuit asserts that although Coca-Cola displays to website visitors a cookie banner that ostensibly gives them the option to control how their information is tracked and how their personal data is used, the beverage giant secretly allows several third parties—including Meta, Google, TikTok, Microsoft, and others—to place and/or transmit cookies that track a user’s browsing activities and intercept their communications, even after they have declined or rejected all categories of non-necessary tracking cookies.

The lawsuit explains that third-party tracking cookies assign unique identifiers to each website visitor to collect real-time information about their browsing history, website interactions, demographics, interests and preferences, device information, and more. Once collected, a consumer’s private information is used to create a detailed profile for targeted advertising, which is shared with unknown parties, the case states.

However, the class action lawsuit charges that after a website visitor opts out of advertising, analytics, and personalization tracking on one of Coca-Cola’s websites, which include the websites of Fanta, Sprite, Powerade, Diet Coke, Gold Peak, Topo Chico, Vitaminwater, Fairlife, Simply, BodyArmor, and Smartwater, third-party cookies nevertheless continue to collect, track, and transmit private user information.

Like most websites, Coca-Cola’s sites are designed to include third-party programming scripts that place cookies or other tracking technologies on users’ web browsers or devices, the case says. However, the filing alleges that Coca-Cola has misled users with regard to their control over their privacy preferences.

“Unlike many websites, however, [Coca-Cola] affirmatively represented that users could browse the Websites without being tracked, followed, or targeted by third-party data brokers and advertisers,” the lawsuit says. “Those representations were false.”

Per the suit, website visitors specifically try to avoid the kind of tracking and surveillance alleged in the complaint by rejecting cookies, but Coca-Cola, the case claims, has ignored users’ preferences and benefits financially from the resulting analytics and advertising data.

The Coca-Cola class action lawsuit looks to cover all individuals who browsed any of the Coca-Cola websites in California after adjusting the toggle switch in the popup cookie consent banners to decline, reject, or opt out of advertising, analytics, and, on the websites where available, personalization cookies.

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