California small businesses sued over their website tracking

Independent businesses in California are being sued over undisclosed tracking on their websites (Meta and Google “spyware” and analytics).

Unfortunately, it’s predatory law firms that are filing the suits, using as justification the 1967 anti-wiretapping California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), recently expanded to include data collection.

It’s satisfying to see attention focused on the issue of online surveillance, although I have some sympathy for small businesses that have cluelessly built Google and Meta into their sites and are now paying the price.

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Or, even, paid some other small business to whip up a modest web site, which other business then expeditiously uses components that have Big Tech spying embedded within them.

If web sites are forced to remove the embedded spyware then that will be a good thing. However, predatory law firms don’t do this out of love. So, if small businesses are financially damaged in dealing with predatory law firms then this will be a mix of good and bad.