TelevisaUnivision Plaintiff Cites Calif. Decision to Support Her Arbitration Opposition
The Feb. 27 decision in the Northern District of California in Massel v. Successfulmatch.com (docket 23-cv-02389) provides supplemental authority to support Indira Falcon’s opposition to TelevisaUnivision Digital’s motion to compel her claims to arbitration, said Falcon’s notice Friday (docket 8:23-cv-02340)…
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in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Tampa. Falcon’s class action alleges TelevisaUnivision knowingly violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by embedding the Meta Pixel tool on its website to track users’ video viewing history and then reporting that history to Facebook (see 2310170001). Falcon’s opposition contends that TelevisaUnivision failed to give her and her class members proper “inquiry notice” of its terms and arbitration provision. The judge in Massel found that because the defendant’s links to its terms didn’t appear in a contrasting color, the court must conclude that they weren’t reasonably conspicuous enough to put Massel on notice of the terms and that the plaintiff therefore can’t be said to have assented to them, said Falcon’s notice. “This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that other links on the signup page appear in all capital letters,” while the links to the service agreement and privacy policy are in “title case,” it said. These distinctions “may seem picayune,” but website operators “have ultimate control over their design decisions,” it said. Nothing requires them to present terms as “subtle hyperlinks” to separate pages instead of requiring users to scroll through the actual terms before signing up, it said.