Guess you've got to read the fine print online as well as offline: A federal judge has thrown out lawsuits accusing Northwest Airlines of violating its own privacy policies. The plaintiffs argued that the airline's Website-posted policy couldn't be enforced unless they claimed to have read it.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson held that because the plaintiffs never contended they actually read the privacy policy, their "expectation of privacy was low."
That ruling, in turn, has provoked a number of renewed calls for federal privacy legislation, including from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I don't think it's relevant whether or not they actually read the privacy policy first," senior EFF staff attorney Lee Tien told CNET. "Think of all the 'fine print' we run into every day – warranties and the like. Rather than focus on what the plaintiffs actually read, we should focus on what Northwest said it would do."
The lawsuits accused Northwest of violating both law and its own privacy policy, when they gave passenger information to the federal government following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Electronic Privacy Information Center general counsel David Sobel told CNET the court's rationale brings under question any policy posted on any Website.
The court ruling comes in the wake of the Federal Trade Commission saying they plan to step up privacy-related cases against Internet operators. The FTC's director of consumer protection, J. Howard Beales III, told the Privacy Futures conference in San Francisco last week that the commission expected to bring such a case out in the next several weeks.
The case in question is said to involve a thus-far unnamed Internet operation changing its privacy policy retroactively, giving it a loophole through which they could allegedly share personal information after having agreed previously and formally not to do so. No further details were divulged by Beales.
