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Tech blog GigaOm is one of a number of companies being sued in a class action lawsuit that alleges that US State and Federal privacy laws have been breached.
The class action suit targets KISSmetrics and a range of their customers (including GigaOm) alleging that the KISSmetrics technology tracks users who have deleted their cookies, by accessing cached browser files, Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 to gather private and otherwise protected data.
Other companies named in the lawsuit include the AOL owned About.me, music service Spotify, Slideshare, Spokeo and SEOMoz.
Paul Walborsky, CEO, GigaOM said in a post on the site that
We want to assure our readers that the claims against GigaOM are based on misinformation. We are confident that they will be found to have no merit.
GigaOM respects our users’ privacy. Our relationship with our community comes first and foremost, and we would never do anything that violates that trust you have in us. Like most other companies on the Internet, we have to rely on outside vendors’ services to support our service and help us do a better job. As soon as we became aware of the concerns about KISSmetrics technology, we suspended the use of it on our site while we investigate the claims.
On the evidence at hand it would appear that GigaOm, and the other sites using KISSmetrics tracking tools may been innocent victims, not knowingly participating in any breaches of privacy, should the case against KISSmetrics’ technology be proven.
We’ll keep an eye on the case and report back as we hear more.
