Session replay scripts enable companies to track every move that users to their website make: what they type, what they click, where their mouse goes, and where it lingers.
In Pennsylvania, it’s only lawful for a website to hire a third-party to record its website’s visitors if the visitors have consented to the recording. But sometimes websites using session replay software to track their website’s visitors don’t even let you know they’re tracking you. And you can’t consent to something you could not reasonably have known was even happening!
Pennsylvanians who visited a website that used a third-party tracking script to track them online but did not consent to that tracking may have a claim against the owner of that site under WESCA, Pennsylvania’s wiretapping law.
How do you tell if you may have been recorded online? One of the easiest ways to learn about the type of data a website may be gathering about you is Blacklight. Blacklight is a website privacy inspector conceived and developed by engineer, artist, and journalist Surya Mattu that allows you to input any website and then “scan” it to get a sense of how the website may be tracking you and sharing your data with third parties.
For example, the website www.biglots.com — featured on our list of five companies that are tracking Pennsylvanians online — uses a session record program called FullStory to record the online behavior of its website visitors. And when you enter www.biglots.com into Blacklight, Blacklight will give you an accessible overview of how biglots.com is tracking you: the number third-party cookies found on the site (42!), the types of keystrokes it logs, etc.
If you’re a Pennsylvanian who suspects you may have visited a website that unlawfully tracked you online, reach out to Kneupper & Covey using this form