Alabama resident Samuel Green has filed a second lawsuit against the Washington Post Company's Cable One for allegedly selling data about his Web-surfing activity to defunct behavioral targeting company NebuAd.
"The relationship between Cable One and NebuAd represented an unprecedented and extraordinarily pervasive ability to locate and monitor users," Green alleges in a complaint filed recently in federal district court in Alabama. He adds that Cable One's decision to allow NebuAd to glean information about users' Web activity "would be highly offensive and objectionable to a reasonable person."
Cable One and five other Internet service providers -- CenturyTel, Embarq, Knology, Bresnan and Wide Open West -- acknowledged working with NebuAd in response to a congressional inquiry. Green and 14 other consumers brought suit against all six ISPs and NebuAd in November of 2008. Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson in the northern district of California dismissed the lawsuits against the ISPs because neither the ISPs or consumers had connections to that state.
Since then, lawyers representing the consumers have been re-filing the cases one by one in various federal districts. So far, they have also brought new actions against Wide Open West and Embarq.
In contrast to the other broadband companies, Cable One didn't provide any notice to users about NebuAd -- not even passive notice, such as by quietly revising its privacy policy -- or allow them to opt out of the behavioral targeting tests, according to the company's statements to Congress.
The case against NebuAd is still pending in federal district court in San Francisco.
Privacy advocates say that NebuAd's ISP-based targeting posed a more significant threat than older forms of targeting because broadband companies have access to users' entire Web histories. Older behavioral targeting companies only track users at a limited number of sites within a network.
NebuAd consistently denied infringing on users' privacy. The company said that all data collected was anonymous because it didn't know users' names or phone numbers or keep copies of the IP addresses associated with users. NebuAd also said that it did not collect sensitive data, and that users could opt out of the platform.
