Hi CIPAWorld! The Baroness here.
And guess what? Another retailer just got hit with a CIPA filing in California state court.
This time its Vuori – the wildly popular athletic-lifestyle brand.
Plaintiff Armin Matisen is claiming Vuori violated Cal. Penal Code § 638.51 — the CIPA section about pen registers.
According to the complaint, Vuori’s website, http://www.vuoriclothing.com, allegedly deploys a whole network of tracking technologies that let Vuori and a pack of third-party tech partners monitor, record, analyze, and exploit user communications in real time.
Plaintiff alleges these tracking pixels capture a wide range of information including
- IP addresses and approximate geolocation
- device and browser identifiers, operating system data
- HTTP headers and TLS handshake metadata
- full-string URLs, query parameters, and navigation pathways,
- clicks, taps, scroll depth, hover behavior, and mouse movements
- keystroke timing, form field interactions, and timestamp data
- session identifiers and persistent tracking tokens.
Basically: if you moved, clicked, breathed, or scrolled — they say Vuori recorded it.
And then, all this information supposedly is transmitted instantaneously to analytic companies, ad-tech platforms, behavioral modelers, social media pixels, and data brokers.
Plaintiff says this all counts as “interception” requiring prior consent, which he claims Vuori never obtained.
And because the tech allegedly works like a “pen register” or “trap-and-trace device,” Plaintiff alleges Vuori needed a court order under § 638.51 first.
The good news (sort of) is that this is not a putative class action. So instead of talking about millions and billions in exposure, we’re likely looking at thousands of dollars. As a reminder, CIPA statutory damages are $5,000 per violation, so the stakes are still high.
This case was just filed yesterday so it will be interesting to see how far this case goes or whether it fizzles out like so many others. We’ll of course keep an eye on this one.
Stay tuned, CIPAWorld and subscribe for more updates! 😊
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