Consumer Protection & Tech Accountability

PRF Law’s Consumer Protection and Tech Accountability Practice litigates class actions and individual actions to protect the rights of consumers with a focus on holding technology companies accountable for harming their consumers and users.  

Most states have consumer protection laws that make it illegal for businesses to engage in unfair and deceptive practices, including making misrepresentations about business’ goods, services, or practices and false advertising about their goods and services. In addition, some states have laws that protect the privacy rights of their residents or limit the collection and sharing of people’s biometric information. In certain situations, state tort law may protect consumers from products or services that are inherently dangerous or negligently designed. And most state and local civil rights laws protect consumers from discrimination based on race, national origin, and other protected statuses. 

A range of federal laws protect consumers from fraud and abuse and protect consumers’ privacy, including the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal Privacy Act of 1974, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA). 

The Consumer Protection Rights We Enforce:

PRF Law enforces a variety of laws and violations to protect the rights of consumers, including: 

  • Websites, apps, and other businesses that misrepresent the goods or services they provide or that falsely advertise those goods or services. 

  • Websites and apps that are negligently designed or that provide inherently dangerous services, especially those that are harmful to children. 

  • Businesses that discriminate against their customers, either in person or online.  

  • Businesses that collect their customers’ biometric information without obtaining their consent or without providing the required notice. 

Making an Impact

Peter Romer-Friedman’s impact litigation on behalf of consumers has caused some of the largest technology companies in the world to reform their business practices for the benefit of all Americans who use the internet. His work has led to a sea-change in how major companies advertise economic opportunities online and has protected teenagers from inherently dangerous apps. 

  • In Mobley v. Facebook, Inc., No. 16 Civ. 06440 (N.D. Cal.), Peter was lead counsel in a first-of-its-kind challenge to Facebook’s practice of denying job, housing, and credit ads to Facebook users based on their race, sex, and other protected statuses. Peter was the chief negotiator in obtaining a 2019 settlement in which Facebook agreed to far-reaching changes to its advertising platform to prevent employment, housing, and credit discrimination, including creating a special mandatory portal for the creation of employment, housing, and credit ads without discriminatory filtering options. In the aftermath of the 2019 Facebook settlement, Google and Twitter voluntarily made similar changes to prevent advertisers from discriminating against users when advertising employment, housing, and credit opportunities. 

  • In a related case, Peter represented older workers and the Communications Workers of America in suing T-Mobile and Amazon for excluding older workers from receiving their job ads on Facebook. That case, Bradley v. T-Mobile and Amazon.com, No. 17 Civ. 07232 (N.D. Cal.), settled in 2021, and led to many major employers stopping the practice of steering their job ads away from older workers online. In response to dozens of charges that Peter and the Communications Workers of America filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC declared that it violates federal law to deny online job ads to workers because of their gender or age. 

    As a result of these EEOC charges, the T-Mobile/Amazon action, and the 2019 Facebook settlement, the vast majority of companies no longer rely on protected statuses to exclude people from receiving their job, housing, or credit ads. In addition, Peter’s work to stop digital bias contributed to the Department of Housing & Urban Development and Department of Justice filing their own enforcement actions against Facebook. 

  • In Bride v. Snap Inc., No. 21 Civ. 06680 (C.D. Cal.), Peter represented the estate of a teenager who committed suicide after being bullied on anonymous messaging apps that operated as extensions to the popular social media network Snap. Anonymous messaging apps have an infamous track record of causing teenagers to bully each other and leading to teenage suicides. During his work on the case, Peter helped to negotiate a settlement with Snap. As TechCrunch reported in March 2022, after the Bride lawsuit Snap announced that it “is banning anonymous messaging apps and will require anyone building friend-finding apps to limit those apps to users 18 and up.”  

Relevant Cases