in Newswire Published on September 28, 2022

Pet Supplies Plus, Microsoft Accused of Illegally Tracking Website Visitors

Popa v. PSP Group, LLC et al.

Filed: September 22, 2022 ◆§ 2:22-cv-01357

A class action claims Pet Supplies Plus has unlawfully and without consent tracked the electronic communications of consumers who visit its website.

Defendant(s)

Microsoft Corporation PSP Group, LLC Pet Supplies Plus

Law(s)

Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act

State(s)

Pennsylvania

Categories

Privacy

A proposed class action claims Pet Supplies Plus (PSP) has unlawfully and without consent tracked the electronic communications of consumers who visit its website.

The 31-page lawsuit alleges the pet products retailer has committed “insidious privacy intrusions” by embedding session replay code on PetSuppliesPlus.com to record visitors’ interactions with the site, including their mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, inputted text, pages visited and other communications.

Per the suit, this session replay software was supplied by co-defendant Microsoft Corporation, whose Clarity code allows clients to essentially recreate a website visitor’s “entire visit” to a site by replaying videos of every action they took during each session.

“PSP’s procurement of Session Replay Providers, including Microsoft, to secretly deploy Session Replay Codes results in the electronic equivalent of ‘looking over the shoulder’ of each visitor to the PSP website for the entire duration of their website interaction,” the complaint contends.

The lawsuit claims that although session replay software can be used “for some legitimate purposes,” such as improving user experience, the breadth of Pet Supplies Plus’s collection of users’ communications “goes well beyond normal website analytics.” The case notes that session replay software is capable of tracking visitors’ sensitive or private information, even when they haven’t submitted that data to the website.

“For example, if a user writes information into a text form field, but then chooses not to click a ‘submit’ or ‘enter’ button on the website, the Session Replay Code may nevertheless cause the non-submitted text to be sent to the designated event-response-receiving server before the user deletes the text or leaves the page. This information will then be viewable to the website owner when accessing the session replay through the Session Replay Provider.”

According to the case, Microsoft’s Clarity session replay software captures “over 30 different categories” of user information, and even assigns each individual a user ID “so their website use and interactions can be monitored over time.”

Per the suit, visitors to PetSuppliesPlus.com never consented to have their communications wiretapped by the defendants, and were “needlessly harmed” by the companies’ interception of their personal data.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in Pennsylvania whose website communications emanating from the state were captured either through the use of session replay code embedded in PetSuppliesPlus.com or through the use of Microsoft Clarity.

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