A New York woman who sued America's Test Kitchen over Facebook-based "tracking" code on its Web site has agreed to settle the case without damages after the concern agreed to remove the code from its Web pages.
Anca Adams had filed a class-action suit that potentially could have cost America's Test Kitchen, which has 200 employees, 44 burners and 34 ovens in its Innovation and Design Building headquarters - up to $1 billion in damages had she won. But in a filing in the case in US District Court in Boston yesterday, her attorneys said the company had shown it had no lawsuit liability insurance and no resources to pay anything near that amount, oh, and, yes, there was no guarantee Adams would have won the case.
ATK’s representations about its finances - made in good faith and supported by documentary evidence - support the conclusion that it does not have the ability to fund a fair and reasonable damages settlement for a Class comprised of approximately 600,000 individuals.
As part of a settlement agreement, which has to be approved by the judge in the case, America's Test Kitchen agreed to reimburse Adams's lawyers for up to $300,000 in their expenses - and to pay Adams up to $2,500 for her time and trouble as lead plaintiff in the case.
Earlier this year, the Boston Globe agreed to settle a similar lawsuit by creating a fund to pay bostonglobe.com users who had "tracking pixels" attached to pages with video on them.
The pixels send a report to Facebook with some information about the browsers and users who call up the pages.
In both cases, plaintiffs charged this violated their rights under the federal Video Privacy Protection Act - originally passed to protect video-cassette renters from the sort of ignominy faced by one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who had his video-rental habits exposed after somebody rifled them out of the trash.