On August 1, a federal jury in San Francisco delivered a historic verdict in a class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms that has the potential to rewrite the rulebook around the use of private data. The social media giant that owns Facebook, the jury found, had violated a California privacy law by using confidential data it had harvested from Flo, the popular women’s health app, to sell advertising. Meta could now be on the hook for billions in dollars in statutory damages under the California Invasion of Privacy Act.
The case appears to have been one of the first in which Big Tech has been held liable for misusing consumer health information. “I think this is the first time that consumers have been given an opportunity to tell Big Tech how they feel,” says Carol Villegas, a partner in the New York office of Labaton Keller Sucharow, the co-lead counsel for a class of millions of women whose private information was funneled from the Flo Health app to Meta. “The people have spoken, and I think it needs to be a wake-up call for these major technology companies. They need to really change the way they’re doing things.”
To try the case, Labaton teamed up with attorneys from two other boutique law firms — Lowey Dannenberg and Spector Roseman & Kodroff. During the two-week trial of Frasco v. Flo Health Inc. in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, they faced a formidable corps of defense lawyers from firms including Latham & Watkins, Gibson Dunn, and Dentons. But the plaintiffs’ side not only obtained the CIPA verdict against Meta but also a mid-trial settlement from co-defendant Flo Health.
This article was originally published under the firm’s former name, Spector Roseman & Kodroff, P.C. (“SRK”). The firm is now known as Spector Caldes & Corrigan, PC (“SCC”).
