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Thursday, February 6, 2025

Lawsuit Accuses Amazon of Secretly Tracking Consumers Through Cellphones


Amazon.com was sued on Wednesday by shoppers who accused the retailing big of secretly monitoring their actions by way of their cellphones, and promoting information it collects.

According to a proposed class motion in San Francisco federal court docket, Amazon obtained “backdoor entry” to shoppers’ telephones by offering tens of hundreds of app builders with code often called Amazon Ads SDK to be embedded of their apps.

This allegedly enabled Amazon to gather an infinite quantity of timestamped geolocation information about the place shoppers dwell, work, store and go to, revealing delicate data similar to spiritual affiliations, sexual orientations and well being considerations.

“Amazon has successfully fingerprinted shoppers and has correlated an enormous quantity of non-public details about them fully with out shoppers’ information and consent,” the criticism mentioned.

The criticism was filed by Felix Kolotinsky of San Mateo, California, who mentioned Amazon collected his private data by way of the “Speedtest by Ookla” app on his cellphone.

He mentioned Amazon’s conduct violated California’s penal regulation and a state regulation in opposition to unauthorised laptop entry, and seeks unspecified damages for tens of millions of Californians.

Amazon, based mostly in Seattle, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. Lawyers for the plaintiff didn’t instantly reply to requests for added remark.

Individuals and regulators are more and more complaining that corporations are attempting to revenue from data gathered with out consent from cellphones.

On January 13, the state of Texas sued Allstate for allegedly monitoring drivers by way of cellphones, utilizing the info to boost premiums or deny protection, and promoting the info to different insurers.

Allstate mentioned its information assortment absolutely complies with all legal guidelines and rules. At least eight comparable personal lawsuits in opposition to Allstate have been subsequently filed.

The case is Kolotinsky v Amazon.com Inc et al, US District Court, Northern District of California, No. 25-00931.

© Thomson Reuters 2025

(This story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)



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