Last week, a case was filed in federal court that alleges a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, breached the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including kids.
Lawyers representing a group of minors and their parents filed the suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, records show. The lawsuit alleges that Clearspring Technologies, a software company that creates widgets and also offers a way to serve ads via widgets, is at the center of the wrongdoing.
Web site operators such as Disney, Playlist.com, and SodaHead are “Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates,” the plaintiffs allege in their suit. Clearspring set “Flash cookies on (affiliate site) users’ computers…online tracking device(s) which would allow access to and disclosure of Internet users’ online activities.”
Clearspring is the largest online content sharing network connecting publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the social web. Clearspring’s universal sharing platform AddThis enables leading publishers like ABC, AOL, Demand Media, MTV, MySpace, NBC to distribute and track digital content such as links, widgets, videos, and photos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and other web services.
Ranked #1 by comScore, AddThis includes 3rd party services like Facebook, MySpace, Posterous, and Orkut.
