McLean, Va. – Clearspring, the developer of the AddThis
sharing platform and online widgets, said that it plans to "vigorously
defend" itself against a federal class action lawsuit claiming that
several major websites illegally tracked the surfing activities of site
visitors through Flash cookies developed by the firm.
"We have made an
initial review of the lawsuit and found it to be factually inaccurate with
respect to the company’s technologies and practices," wrote Clearspring
CEO Hooman Radfar on the company’s blog.
"Most importantly, Clearspring
does not and never did collect, store, or sell personally identifiable
information."
The suit was filed last week against Clearspring and several
large media firms, including Disney, Warner Bros. and Demand Media.
The
complaint alleges the defendants knew that Clearspring was illegally tracking
the movements of visitors well beyond their own sites, with the information
then sold to third parties.
"The Company used Adobe Flash local storage in
a manner consistent with other leading Flash analytics providers to deliver
standard web analytics to publishers," wrote Radfar.
Related Links:
http://www.clearspring.com/blog/2010/08/17/the-way-we-used-flash
http://tinyurl.com/235ooqz
(PDF of complaint)
http://tinyurl.com/2389l2p
(DMW previous coverage)
