Stephen A. Broome

Stephen A. Broome specializes in defending companies sued over online data privacy concerns. He’s been very busy.

These days, he said, “basically everybody is being sued.” That’s because the plaintiffs’ bar has developed a theory that whenever a website sends any sort of identifying data to another site or utilizes third-party services, it amounts to illegal wiretapping.

“But that’s just not how the internet works,” he said.

He won a very important victory for Google two years ago to end a class action claiming the company breached a promise to all Chrome users not to collect browsing data unless the users had enabled Chrome’s sync feature. The theoretical damages were “in the very high billions,” he said.

After a daylong evidentiary hearing, a federal judge ruled that Google had adequately disclosed, and users had consented to the data collection. The ruling is important to other website owners because “consent is the first-line defense” in privacy claims, Broome said. The case is now on appeal. Calhoun v. Google LLC, 22-16993 (9th Cir., filed Dec. 27, 2022).

He won another important ruling for Google that denied class certification in a case complaining about how much information websites collect when using the browser’s “private browsing” mode. The judge ruled a class was not proper because some users were aware of how the private modes work. The parties recently told the court they had reached a preliminary settlement. Brown v. Google LLC, 5:20-cv-03664 (N.D. Cal., filed June 2, 2020).

Although the two cases for Google were unrelated, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers issued her rulings on the same day. “It was a very good day for us,” Broome said.

Broome also is representing defendants sued under the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act. It imposes statutory damages every time a website collects facial scans, retinal scans or similar data. Class actions alleging violations “are being filed by the dozen almost every day,” he said.

He represented IBM in a case over its use of a large set of photos for a project to make facial recognition technology less biased. After three years of heavy litigation, he settled the case in May with the two named plaintiffs individually. Vance v. IBM, 1:20-cv-00577 (N.D. Ill., filed Jan. 23, 2020).

— Don DeBenedictis