Web Site for Complaints Sparks Lawsuit
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When Alan and Linda Townsend were unhappy with the sprayed-on siding applied to their house, the frustrated couple launched a Web site to complain and to give other unsatisfied customers a forum.
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Sears Holdings is facing a class-action lawsuit after&#160;making the purchase history of its customers public&#160;on its Managemyhome.com Web site.The lawsuit seeks damages as well as an accounting by Sears to determine whether the Web site was misused by criminals. It was filed on Friday by New Jersey resident Christine Desantis, who is represented by KamberEdelson, a technology law firm. KamberEdelson is best known for its recent settlement with social networking site Facebook over its sending of unwanted text messages to recycled cell-phone numbers.&quot;It&#39;s a pretty simple case,&quot; said Jay Edelson, a partner with the Chicago-based law firm. &quot;Sears decided to put private information of its customers up on the Web site and make it publicly available. They did it without telling their customers that it was going to happen ... and they really did it for their own financial reasons.&quot;Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips and get home renovation ideas. The Web site had a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that ostensibly was designed to help users look up past purchases.Last Thursday, researchers at security vendor CA pointed out that the feature could be used to look up the purchase history of any Sears customer, an apparent violation of the company&#39;s privacy policy.Manage My Home could easily have been misused by criminals, Edelson said. For example, a robber could gain access to a victim&#39;s home by posing as a Sears repair person, using the information available on the site. That could be incredibly scary, he said. &quot;They have a duty to keep that information away from the public.&quot;Sears disabled the &quot;Find your products&quot; feature&#160;on Friday, saying it would re-introduce the feature once the company figures out a way of ensuring that the information cannot be viewed by unauthorized third parties.However, the retailer was informed of the problem weeks before it took the feature off-line, Edelson said.In late December, CA researchers also criticized Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;onto the desktops of some members of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.KamberEdelson is also investigating that matter, Edelson said.&#160;
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit seeking more information about a U.S. Army unit that scours the Web looking for sensitive military information posted on blogs and Web sites by military personnel.
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Company sues Mac enthusiast site and others, lending credibility to hot rumors surrounding product plans.
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Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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Complaint includes violation of privacy, false advertising, and unjust enrichment.
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Google Inc.'s Blogger service has been generating a steady stream of complaints from users this year.
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Retailer Sears, Roebuck & Co has been hit with a lawsuit seeking class-action status that alleges a company Web site compromises customers' private information.
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Online consumers in the U.S. have had a million things to complain about. Literally.
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An obscure government website that became an Internet conflagration
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After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group Inc. (SCO) has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes.
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America Online Inc. said Thursday it had filed a federal lawsuit accusing numerous unnamed defendants of violating federal and state laws by sending bulk messages known as &quot;spim&quot; to instant message accounts and Internet chat rooms.
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Sears Holdings is facing a class-action lawsuit after&#160;making the purchase history of its customers public&#160;on its Managemyhome.com Web site.
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A company that sells Internet domain names is facing criticisms for holding some in reserve as a consumer-protection measure, a move that also prevents interested parties from shopping around for better prices.
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Google must face a Wisconsin companyâs lawsuit over a toolbar feature that generates Web links from search data, a federal appeals court decided.
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Comments from groups and individual Internet users were filed with the FCC.
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SCO is sick and tired of being &quot;dissed&quot; by online bloggers and journalists, and it&#39;s not going to take it anymore. So, it&#39;s launching its own Web site to tell its side of the story concerning its many legal disputes.