A lawsuit was filed on August 10 (Tuesday) against several popular websites supposedly because of secretly spying on surfers, particularly children. The websites include those of Warner Bros. Records, Disney, and Demand Media.

The lawsuit alleged that Clearspring Technologies, who created the widgets in question, have violated a number of laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Invasion of Privacy Act, and the Computer Crime law of California.

As described in the original suit, Clearspring Technologies used "Flash cookies" to track not only their affiliate's websites but also secretly tracked how users used the web. The plaintiffs that represented minors and their parents were Parisi & Havens and the Law Office of Joseph Malley. They filed the suit against Clearspring and its clients (which include Disney, SodaHead, and Playlist.com). They are the same law firms that filed a suit against Clearspring's rival company Quantcast including their clients (which includes ABC and NBC) the week before.

With the issue of Web privacy being talked all over the net such as that of Facebook, and Google, people are getting even more worried about their own privacy. When the University of California Berkeley researchers published a report on how well known web sites, which used Adobe Flash to gather information from its users, lawsuits began coming in.

According to the report, these "Flash cookies" cannot be removed like regular cookies. These cookies could even be used to revive regular cookies that have been deleted. Researchers pointed out in the report that the companies Clearspring and QuantCast used Flash cookies in this manner. Most of the information gathered was rather personal and very wide in scope. Users could even be tracked from whatever computer they used. Information such as race, gender, age, children, educational attainment, location, household income, videos watched, sexual choices, person's identity, e-mail, phone numbers, and even health data could be obtained.

Congress is still working on how to improve privacy laws when it comes to Internet usage. In the meantime, the lawsuit's complainants have requested this suit be put to class-action status. Is privacy in the web really dead? Let’s see what the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has to say about it.

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