ALM Benefits Pro: “Business-focused social media platform LinkedIn has been slapped with three digital privacy class actions contending that it illegally intercepted users’ sensitive health care information to use in targeted advertising. All three cases, filed by Bursor & Fisher in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the Santa Clara County Superior Court, asserted wiretapping claims under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The claims were brought on behalf of class members who made appointments on the websites of health care companies Spring Fertility, a fertility clinic; online psychotherapy platform Therapymatch Inc., doing business as Headway; and accessible urgent care provider Village Practice Management Co., doing business as CityMD. The complaints accuse LinkedIn of accessing users’ private personal and health care information, such as gender, sexual orientation and the conditions for which they were seeking treatment, via its tracking tool, the LinkedIn Insight Tag, which was installed on the companies’ websites. “Tracking technology litigation, including wiretapping claims under CIPA, can affect basically any company with a public-facing website,” said Stacy Boven, privacy and technology attorney at Nixon Peabody who leads the firm’s tracking technology team. “This litigation is impacting a wide range of industries, especially those that benefit most from leveraging data for client management and advertising purposes.” LinkedIn, a Microsoft-owned company based in Sunnyvale, California, is the largest professional networking site in the world with over 1 billion users, according to its website. In addition to job search and career development services, LinkedIn offers marketing tools in the form of the LinkedIn Insight Tag, a snippet of JavaScript code fueled by LinkedIn cookies that businesses can embed into their websites to track visitor activity. After matching the website visitors with their LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn provides companies with consumer engagement analytics based on the collected data to improve their marketing strategies and targeted ad campaigns…”