9 major e-commerce lawsuits from Instacart, Google, Adobe, Zappos, Apple, Amazon, and more

There was so much news about lawsuits this week, I decided to give it a dedicated section! Let's see who's getting sued, who made it out of the hotseat, and who settled. 

1. Instacart agreed to pay $60M in refunds to settle FTC allegations that the company failed to disclose mandatory service fees and hid refund options from users. For example, the FTC demonstrated that Instacart falsely offered “free delivery” to customers on their first order, but still required them to pay a mandatory service fee to get their groceries delivered. Basically they just gave the “delivery fee” a different name. Instacart denied any wrongdoing, claiming that it uses “straightforward marketing, transparent pricing and fees, clear terms, easy cancellation and generous refund policies,” but confirmed the settlement.
2. Apple and Amazon are facing a new UK class action seeking over £900M for over 10M buyers of Apple products for allegedly colluding to restrict independent sellers and inflate prices. The lawsuit alleges that a 2018 agreement led Amazon to block most third-party sellers from offering Apple products while granting Amazon favorable wholesale terms, effectively pushing independent resellers off the marketplace by early 2019 and leaving shoppers with fewer discounts and higher prices. The two companies had a similar case dismissed in the U.S. a few months ago. Doesn't Amazon have a right to say “no resellers” for any brand? And doesn't Apple have a right to implement a Minimum Advertised Price policy for any of its resellers that would effectively standardize pricing for its products across Amazon anyway? It's a fine line I guess between “collusion” and “independently agreeing to implement policies at the same time.”
3. Adobe is facing a class action lawsuit spearheaded by an Oregon author who claims that the company used pirated versions of books to train its SlimLM program, which is a small LLM that can work on mobile devices. The lawsuit claims Adobe’s SlimLM model was trained on the SlimPajama dataset, which plaintiffs say is derived from RedPajama and includes the Books3 collection, a dataset of roughly 191,000 books that has been criticized for containing copyrighted material. At some point, every company with an LLM that hasn't been sued yet should just come forward and preemptively settle with book authors, because they all did it!
4. Zappos is facing a class-action lawsuit accusing it of secretly sharing shoppers' data with Meta without consent, despite promising to keep their information confidential. The plaintiffs argue that Zappos violated federal and California privacy laws by permitting Meta's pixel to intercept customers' electronic communications without their knowledge or consent, even though the company explicitly told customers that their personal information would not be used or shared for interest-based advertising, and claim that Meta received customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, location data and purchase details during these interactions. A California federal judge recently denied a motion from Adidas to dismiss a similar class-action lawsuit, so she's got a chance!
5. Speaking of Meta… The company agreed to a $50M settlement to resolve allegations that it deceived millions of users about privacy controls and allowed third-party apps to improperly access personal information for years. The settlement stems all the way back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2013, which affected around 7M Facebook users in California. Meta did not admit to any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay the $50M in civil penalties and implement reforms on how it oversees third-party applications for the next three years. Ouch! I'm sure Meta was hurting over that rounding error. 
6. Remember last week when I reported that a startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” filed a formal petition with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to cancel X's trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet” due to the company abandoning the Twitter brand and no longer using the terms? Well now X is countersuing Operation Bluebird for copyright infringement for “brazenly attempting to steal the world-famous TWITTER brand,” claiming that it never gave up the Twitter name and logo, despite the rebrand. X defends its trademark over the fact that millions of people still access the X platform through the Twitter.com domain and use the terms “Twitter” and “Tweet” when referring to the platform and its posts. I'd say that this lawsuit feels like Elon Musk using his wealth and ample legal teams to bully and intimidate the operation, but Operation Bluebird already started using the Twitter trademarks in their marketing! They kind of had this countersuit coming to them.
7. noyb, a European privacy advocacy group that focuses on enforcing data protection laws, filed two complaints with the Austrian data protection authority against TikTok, AppsFlyer, and Grindr for unlawfully tracking user data across third-party apps. The group alleges that TikTok utilized AppsFlyer to access sensitive information, including a user's sexual orientation inferred from Grindr usage, without valid consent under GDPR, and that TikTok failed to provide complete data in response to access requests and utilized a “download tool” that withheld relevant personal information. Does TikTok really need Grindr to determine a user's sexual orientation? I figured that'd be obvious after about the fourth or fifth video swipe.
8. A U.S. federal judge dismissed a lawsuit accusing Google and TikTok of negligently hosting harmful videos, ruling the claims were barred by Section 230 and product liability laws. The plaintiffs argued the platforms ignored reports of harmful content, but the court found the case amounted to a disagreement over content moderation decisions rather than result of the social media companies offering a “defective” product. The dismissal was issued with prejudice, preventing the plaintiffs from refiling unless an appeals court intervenes.
9. Last but not least… Google is suing SerpAPI, a data extraction service that provides structured results from Google and other search engines via APIs, for allegedly using hundreds of millions of fake search requests to scrape Google search results, bypass security protections, and resell copyrighted content at scale. Google claims the scraping targeted licensed and content-rich results such as Knowledge Panels, Maps, and Shopping listings, and is seeking monetary damages and an injunction to stop the activity. The lawsuit follows similar allegations brought by Reddit earlier this year against SerpApi and other scrapers over unauthorized data use tied to AI training.