In a significant development in the ever-expanding world of privacy class actions, earlier this month a federal judge in Florida denied dismissal of a website privacy claim brought under the Florida Security of Communications Act (FSCA). For years, Florida courts have been reluctant to find that this 50-year-old wiretapping statute could be applied to third-party technologies that analyzed consumer behavior on websites. When a wave of privacy class actions was filed under the FSCA a few years ago, the claims were almost uniformly rejected, as the courts found that the information allegedly intercepted by website technologies had little resemblance to the contents of a wiretapped telephone call. But on March 6, a district court in the Middle District of Florida took a new look at some of the latest website technologies and, in doing so, may have thrown the FSCA back into the mix of decades-old statutes that pose new dangers to consumer-facing websites.

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