Casper Sleep has been hit with a proposed consumer class action lawsuit, alleging the online mattress retailer, along with marketing company NaviStone, violates federal privacy laws by “secretly” tracking visitors to its website casper.com regardless of whether the user ultimately buys a mattress.
Plaintiff Brady Cohen filed the proposed class action lawsuit Tuesday in New York federal court, claiming that on several occasions within the past 6 months, he visited casper.com, but has never bought a mattress from Casper. He contends that during these visits his electronic communications with the website were illegally captured and then redirected to NaviStone – a data broker that tracks website visitor behavior – in real time, and used the intercepted data to “attempt to learn his identity, postal address,” and other personally identifiable Information.
By doing so, the Casper Mattresses lawsuit states, the companies are in violation of the Electronics Communication Privacy Act, also known as the “Wiretap Act”, which prohibits the intentional interception of wire, oral, and electronic communications unless specifically authorized by a court order.
New to the market, Casper, the complaint asserts, has quickly become one of the country’s leading manufacturer and retailer of mattresses. According to the Casper Mattresses lawsuit, a June 2017 New York Times article reported that Casper was valued at $750 million and that the company reportedly rejected a $1 billion buyout offer from Target in August 2017.
The 21-page complaint includes screenshots of Casper’s website alongside Google Chrome’s Developer Tools Network View, showing incoming and outgoing transmissions. The lawsuit claims that when casper.com is loaded in a web browser, the website automatically retrieves a computer file located on a remote server that contains a computer code written in a language called JavaScript. This code is referred to as a “back door” that allows NaviStone to essentially capture a user’s browsing data, unbeknownst to them.
Once the consumer’s information is intercepted and captured, NaviStone stores the profile on back-end database, including consumers’ names and mailing addresses. As users browse various e-commerce websites that deploy NaviStone code, the data broker attempts to “match” elements of the intercepted data with records of real-life people. Once a match is found, NaviStone de-anonymizes the user and updates its back-end database with the consumer’s current browsing activities and personal information. This, Cohen alleges is done despite the consumer never technically providing that information to other websites, the lawsuit states.
The proposed Casper Mattress Wiretapping class action lawsuit seeks to represent a nationwide class of consumers whose electronic communications were intercepted through the use of NaviStone’s wiretaps on casper.com. Along with recovery for equitable monetary relief, Cohen is requesting statutory damages in the amount of $10,000 per class member.
Cohen and the proposed class are represented by Scott A. Bursor, Neal J. Deckant, Frederick J. Klorczyk III, and Alec M. Leslie of Bursor & Fisher PA.
The Casper Mattresses Wiretapping Class Action Lawsuit is Cohen et al. v. Casper Sleep Inc et al., Case No. 1:17-cv-09325, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
but how does he know they captured his keystrokes?
Yes I would like to know if my info was captured as I have been on their site browsing and also purchased pillows from them.