A federal lawsuit earlier filed this week accuses Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress startup, and a software company named NaviStone of illegally collecting information from visitors to the Casper website in an attempt to learn their identities.
The 21-page suit, which is seeking class-action status, alleges that New York City resident Brady Cohen visited the Casper website several times over the past six months while he was shopping for a new mattress. He didn’t know the company, which has disrupted a $14 billion mattress industry, was using NaviStone’s technology to learn his personally identifiable information (PII), such as his name and postal address, without his consent. Cohen wound up not buying a Casper mattress.
According to the court filing, Casper is able to observe the keystrokes, mouse clicks and other electronic communications and get detailed information on visitors’ habits, thanks to secret NaviStone code embedded in its site, which functions as an illegal wiretap.
The Nov. 28 filing says: “…when connecting to a website that runs this remote code from NaviStone, a visitor’s IP address and other PII is sent to NaviStone in real-time. This real-time interception and transmission of visitors’ electronic communications begins as soon as the visitor loads casper.com into their web browser.”
Why would you have an IP address attached to your machine? Why would you name your machine with a your name? Why would you care if a Mattress company tried to market to you? You are in the phone book?