NEW YORK — Joseph Sofer and Gregory C. Antrim, members of the IPSILON USA team, successfully represented jewelry retailer Effy Worldwide Corp. in an AAA consumer arbitration alleging unlawful interception of a visitor’s website search under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and the federal Wiretap Act. On October 5, arbitrator Howard L. Pearlman identified the requirement of interception while a communication is in transit as a key issue and found Effy’s proposed dispositive motion likely to succeed. The claimant then voluntarily dismissed all remaining claims with prejudice. The case is closed, with no damages awarded against Effy.

The claimant’s Chrome DevTools screenshots showed a search term appearing in requests to Google, Meta and Pinterest. Sofer and Antrim, working with Effy’s technical team, demonstrated why a request to a third-party domain does not necessarily show that the original search was intercepted. The browser sent its search to Effy, a results page was generated, and separate browser-side marketing code reported information from that completed search page. A controlled test showed Pinterest and Meta event requests beginning after the search request had finished. The test illustrated the sequence to be outside the scope of interception as required by CIPA.

“A browser log may show a search term in several places, but the sequence matters,” said Joseph Sofer, Partner and Chief Executive Officer of IPSILON USA. “Here, the evidence supported later, separately generated event reports—not the interception of the original search while it was traveling to its destination.”

The defense also examined the claimant’s deliberate use of DevTools to investigate where information traveled, at the same time that their browser downloaded defendant’s website. Sofer compared that inquiry to a caller asking, “Is this conversation being recorded?”—a circumstance relevant to what the person knew and whether any later communication was made with consent.

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