Michael W. Sobol

Sobol leads his firm’s consumer protection and cybersecurity & data privacy practice groups, and it is clear to him that we are living in what he describes as a surveillance society. Especially since the pandemic, “the reality is … a significant portion of life is taking place online,” he said.

Much of his litigation practice is dedicated to ensuring that consumers have control over their own data.

A good example of that is the trio of lawsuits he settled in April against makers of game apps for children, including Disney, Viacom and the company behind “Subway Surfers,” which he said is “the most downloaded child gaming app of all time.” The lawsuits accused the companies of transmitting children’s personal information through the games in order to display targeted ads. McDonald v. Kiloo A/S, 3:17-cv-04344 (N.D. Cal., filed July 31, 2017).

“What we have achieved in that litigation, I think, is a step forward in reclaiming self-determination and the ability to give consumers some agency over their data,” Sobol said.

This April, he filed a potential class action over another allegedly faulty app. The lawsuit claims Google’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app “enables third parties to link that [positive] diagnosis back to the particular patient.” Diaz v. Google LLC, 5:21-cv-03080 (N.D. Cal., filed April 27, 2021).

It is not his first case against Google. He is co-lead interim class counsel in an action alleging that even after Android cell phone users turned off location tracking, the company stored the users’ location data. And last year, he won a $13 million settlement from Google in a class action alleging the company’s cars taking photos for its Street View feature also collected information from nearby residents’ Wi-Fi networks.

Sobol is pressing a very different action in Arizona against Walgreens and Theranos, the now defunct medical startup that claimed to obtain detailed diagnostic data from tiny blood draws. The lawsuit claims the two companies sold the tests to consumers prematurely even though the system was still under development. In re Arizona Theranos Inc. Litigation, 2:16-cv-2138 (D. Ariz., filed June 29, 2016).

He said the claim the case makes on behalf of people who relied on the tests is a dignitary tort. “We allege a mass battery,” he said. “It’s an extremely novel situation. I’m extremely proud of our representation of the class.”

— Don DeBenedictis