“It just got even tougher to stop a company from tracking your movements online,” Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rolfe Winkler report for The Wall Street Journal.
“A federal judge in Delaware Wednesday dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought against Google and two other tech companies, arguing that the Web users who brought the case couldn’t prove that Google’s tracking practices caused them harm,” Dwoskin and Winkler report. “The plaintiffs were users of web browsers from Apple and Microsoft, which have settings that block ‘cookies,’ the tiny pieces of code placed on computers to track users’ movements as they browse the Internet.”
“The plaintiffs alleged that Google, and online advertisers Vibrant Media and the Media Innovation Group, had ‘tricked’ the browsers into accepting cookies, and as a result were subject to targeted ads,” Dwoskin and Winkler report. “U.S. District Judge Sue Robinson wrote that the companies had circumvented the browsers’ settings, allowing users’ personal information to be sold to ad companies. But the judge said that the plaintiffs couldn’t show that they suffered because the companies collected and sold their information.”
Read more in the full article here.
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