Class Action Roundup – February 13, 2015

Every week, we bring you the latest and most interesting cases making the news. It’s been another good week for class action controversies, so let’s get straight to it. Here’s the latest ClassAction.org Roundup!

“Zombie” Cookies Lawsuit Raises More Online Privacy Concerns

Online privacy is one of the most hotly contested topics of the digital age, with ever-developing technology seeming to bring ever-developing problems. Last Friday, some of the net’s top news and entertainment websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd were sued in federal court for allegedly re-creating cookies (data that tracks your browsing history) after users had deleted them. The lawsuit specifically accuses the companies of using storage in Adobe’s Flash Player to violate federal computer intrusion laws, Wired.com reports. As they explain:

“Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.”

The lawsuit seeks financial damages, as well as a court order requiring the defendants to delete the re-created cookies and stop their current practices.

More Than 360 Corn Lawsuits Filed by Farmers After Syngenta GMO Leads to China Ban

Farmers from twenty states have filed lawsuits against Syngenta, the multinational agribusiness giant, alleging that the company sold GMO corn seeds to farmers – and subsequently contaminated non-GMO corn stocks – before use of the GMO seed was approved in foreign jurisdictions. According to the suit, Syngenta’s Agrisule Viptera corn seed, a GMO product, was approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2010 and sold to farmers in the United States in 2011, but the seeds never received approval from major corn import markets, including China, which rejected shipments of American corn after Viptera traits were found. The lawsuits estimate that the affected farmers lost revenue of somewhere between one and three billion dollars.

Exploding Air Bag Lawsuits Head to Federal Court

ABC News is reporting that lawsuits from across the United States involving allegedly defective air bags have been consolidated in a federal court in Miami. More than 19 million vehicles were recalled globally following reports that the air bags – made by Takata Corp – could suddenly inflate during normal driving conditions. Around 12 million cars containing the defective airbags have been recalled in the States. The consolidation brings together more than 70 potential class actions.

Lack of Closed Captioning Subject of MIT, Harvard Lawsuit

Another story from ABC News, this time about an advocate for the deaf suing Harvard University and MIT over the colleges’ failure to provide closed-caption online content. According to the report:

“The National Association for the Deaf filed class action lawsuits in federal court, saying Harvard and MIT discriminated against the hearing impaired and violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The association said much of Harvard's and MIT's online content was not captioned, was inaccurately captioned or was unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible. Advocates for the deaf say they're not seeking a financial windfall but rather permanent injunctions against the universities mandating that all their online materials include closed captioning, interpretive text displayed onscreen.”

New federal rules providing guidance in this area are expected later in the year, while all new content put online by MIT will include closed captions, a spokeswoman said.

Anthem’s Huge Data Breach May Not Have Caused Injuries, Lawyers Claim

Anthem, Inc.’s data breach, which potentially affected tens of millions of healthcare customers, has understandably spawned several class action lawsuits. In a think piece shared by Reuters last week, however, experts point out that the nature of the data stolen by hackers, which doesn’t include any financial or medical information, could make it hard to prove plaintiffs were injured by the breach. Information that was stolen includes names, addresses, birthdays and – perhaps most worrying – Social Security numbers.