Book It: Amazon In Legal Trouble Over Privacy

Amazon has been hit with a potential class-action lawsuit for allegedly circumventing the privacy settings of Internet Explorer users.

"For years, Amazon has been taking visitors' personal information that it was not entitled to take," Nicole Del Vecchio and Ariana Del Vecchio allege in their complaint against the online retailer, which was filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Their lawsuit alleges that Amazon got around the privacy filters built into Internet Explorer by "spoofing" the browser into classifying Amazon as offering more privacy protections than it did. The Del Vecchios accuse Amazon of violating several laws, including a federal computer fraud law and a Washington state consumer protection law.

The lawsuit comes several months after researchers at Carnegie -Mellon published a study concluding that many Web sites thwart users' privacy settings by providing erroneous information to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That browser enables users to automatically reject certain cookies, including tracking cookies. To accomplish this, the browser relies on Web site operators to provide accurate "compact policies" -- or codes that provide information about their privacy policies to the browser. But, the report stated, many sites using compact policies "are misrepresenting their privacy practices, thus misleading users and rendering privacy protection tools ineffective."

The Del Vecchio's allege in their lawsuit that Amazon was among the companies to use defective compact polices.