Website users today are used to some level of tracking of their internet activity, from targeted advertisements and other types of data collection. One such data-collection technology was the subject of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit’s scrutiny in Jones v. Bloomingdales.com, 124 F.4th 535 (8th Cir. 2024).
The technology at issue is called “session-replay,” which companies employ on their websites to allow them to “discern and record things like [user] mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes (such as text being entered into an information field or text box), search terms, URLs of web pages visited, as well as … what [the user] searched for, what [they] looked at, the information [they] inputted, and what [they] clicked on.” Session-replay technology “allegedly can create unique ‘fingerprints’ of individual users using information obtained from a user’s visit to any website that the provider monitors.”
