Michael W. Sobol

Sobol is chair of Lieff Cabraser’s consumer protection practice group and of its cybersecurity and data privacy group. It is at the intersection of those concerns that he oversees litigation targeting corporate giants accused of misusing technology against customers.

In August, he filed a personal injury class action accusing Google Inc. of violating an express representation to hundreds of millions of mobile device users. The lawsuit alleges Google illegally tracked the locations of millions of mobile phone users. Plaintiffs claim Google routinely and on a massive scale collected and stored location data from mobile phones even when the users attempted to protect it by maximizing the privacy settings on their devices, according to court documents.

“This is just one of our geolocation cases,” Sobol said. “Users were told there’s a way to insure privacy for their daily movements and that their movements were not going to be exploited, but the company was collecting the information nevertheless and finding a lucrative market for it.”

The defendant’s acts violate the California Invasion of Privacy Act and California’s constitutional right to privacy, the complaint alleges. Patacsil v. Google Inc., 3:18-cv-05062 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 17, 2018).

Another series of his cases makes similar claims on behalf of children and their parents, accusing online app developers and their marketing partners. Some of the defendants allegedly inserted code into child-directed apps that allowed them to exfiltrate children’s personal data to track the children over time and across the internet for financial gain via targeted ads. They include McDonald v. Kiloo ApS, 3:17-cv-04344 (N.D. Cal., filed July 31, 2017); Rushing v. The Walt Disney Co., 3:17-cv-04419 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 3, 2017); and Rushing v. Viacom Inc., 3:17-cv-04492 (N.C. Cal., filed Aug. 7, 2017).

“Geolocation data is extraordinarily valuable in the commercial world today,” Sobol said. “You’ve got eyes on you wherever you are, and the object in the commercial world is to use that knowledge to try to sell you stuff.”

He said the implications go well beyond any individual case to threaten democracy itself, as was seen in the emerging evidence of foreign governmental use of internet data to attempt to sway elections.

“Do we have autonomy of thought or are we being influenced by the intrusion of data into our private lives?” Sobol said. “It is critical for a democracy to have the right to do critical thinking in our own space without being influenced without our knowing about it.”

Sobol says the bigger picture these cases paint sometimes leads him “to sound like I’m on a soapbox,” but he doesn’t apologize.

“It is exciting and rewarding to be engaged in something you truly believe in,” he added.

– John Roemer