Zip Code Requests Land Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie In Hot Water

Everyone has them. Companies want them. And now the fight to protect them is spreading across the country.

This isn’t money, though. It’s zip codes.

In some cases, the gathered addresses may be sold to third party advertisers.

We’ve covered previous cases of companies requiring zip codes from customers (“Zip code Wars Heat Up in CA, MA”), and now a class action lawsuit has been launched in D.C. alleging that two retailers misled customers into thinking that it was necessary to provide a zip code when paying with a credit card. Credit card companies have stated before that they never require this information to process a transaction. Instead, retailers have been electing to request it - or, in some cases, require it as part of their automated system. Why? A zip code gives them your address, and your address can be a useful commodity for marketing purposes.

It’s a questionable practice and is never in the consumer’s interests.

In D.C., Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie have been accused of asking customers for their zip code at the register without alerting them to the fact that the request is not mandatory. Although there’s no applicable federal law, D.C. legislation makes it a crime to gather information by misleading customers – and it is this which forms the basis for the class action.

More than fifty class action lawsuits have been filed across the country against various companies over the practice of gathering zip codes. In some cases, the gathered addresses may be sold to third party advertisers. Even in cases where information has been collected for a specific purpose – to plan future store locations, for example – companies are free to sell on the information for further uses. For consumers, it can mean targeted advertising in the mail – but it also raises concerns about identity theft and the safeguards businesses put in place to protect individual’s information once it’s collected. In D.C., and several other states, customers are turning to class actions in a bid to stamp down on a practice which relies, most of all, on the public’s innocence of the law.

For more information on when and where you should share your zip code, along with your social security number, see last months’ article examining the topic.