Apple refuses to repair Harrison Varnes’ Apple Watch under the Apple Care+ service contract he bought for $4.34 a month and continued to pay for through December because he has an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) embedded in his chest to prevent future cardiac arrhythmias, alleged Varnes’ breach of contract class action Thursday (docket 1:24-cv-01007) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn. Apple told the Queens, New York, resident that his ICD rendered him an “unintended user” of the Apple Watch and AppleCare+, said the complaint. After contacting the Apple service team, Varnes on Dec. 12 received 11 separate refunds of $4.34 each, representing credits for the monthly Apple Care+ payments he made for 2023, it said. But at no time did Varnes agree that these refunds “would be in full satisfaction of his claims,” it said. Varnes has received no further offers of compensation from Apple for his two prior years of payments for AppleCare+, despite Apple’s admissions that it never intended to perform services on his Apple Watch, which still hasn’t been repaired, it said. Nothing in the AppleCare+ contract suggests that AppleCare+ services aren’t available to Apple Watch customers with ICDs or defibrillators, the complaint said. Varnes, by counsel, served a pre-suit notice and demand letter on Apple Jan. 18, formally notifying it of the breach of its AppleCare+ contract and demanding that Apple repair his Apple Watch or provide compensation, said the complaint. Apple responded Jan. 26, confirming that it wouldn’t repair his Apple Watch under the AppleCare+ contract because of Varnes' ICD, it said. It pointed to language in an “obscure” subdomain of the Apple website that instructs Apple Watch owners not to use the device with a cardiac pacemaker or ICD, it said. “The language says nothing about Apple refusing to service an Apple Watch product under AppleCare+ merely because the Apple Watch user has a cardiac pacemaker or ICD,” it said. Varnes sues on behalf of himself and a class he defines as all individuals with cardiac pacemakers or ICDs or other implanted electronic devices who bought an Apple Watch within the U.S. and are or were covered by AppleCare+. His complaint cites research showing that more than 3 million people in the U.S. are thought to have a conventional pacemaker and more than 300,000 are estimated to have an ICD. He alleges that the total claims of individual class members in his action exceed $5 million in the aggregate, exclusive of interest and costs.
Amazon uses a “deceptive scheme to keep its profits -- and consumer prices -- high,” alleged a class action Thursday (docket 2:24-cv-00169) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle.
Comcast didn’t heed warnings from Citrix and “numerous other industry experts who were sounding the alarm” about the cloud computing company’s Citrix Bleed vulnerability in two of its network appliances that led to an October data breach, alleged a class action Thursday (docket 2:24-cv-00599) against the two companies in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The breach affected some 36 million Comcast Xfinity customers.
Plaintiff Racheal Paul and defendant Margaritaville Enterprises stipulate to the dismissal of Paul’s class action with prejudice of her individual claims and without prejudice “as to any other member of the putative class’s right to bring claims,” said their stipulation of dismissal Wednesday (docket 6:23-cv-00223) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Orlando. Each party will bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs, it said. Paul alleged Margaritaville unlawfully sends telemarketing text messages without consent to consumers who listed their numbers on the national do not call registry and to those who specifically asked the company to stop texting them (see 2303210003). Paul listed her cellphone number on the DNC registry in April 2014, yet she alleges receiving at least two text solicitations offering her a free appetizer if she visited a Margaritaville restaurant.
Stuart Nissenbaum brought suit against Restoration Holdings to stop it from sending him automated telemarketing text messages promoting the sale of its hair restoration services in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, said his class action Wednesday (docket 1:24-cv-01075) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. Restoration’s automated equipment continued to send these messages even after the Denver resident “repeatedly instructed” it to stop, said his complaint. He alleges receiving multiple text-message solicitations from Restoration between Oct. 4 and Jan. 30, and that the company “failed to institute the procedures necessary to honor do-not-call requests,” it said. “It is industry standard for automated text message systems to honor stop requests immediately and to send an acknowledgment of the stop request,” it said. But Restoration “failed to meet these standards,” it said. Its actions harmed Nissenbaum “by intruding upon his seclusion, interfering with the legitimate use of his phone, wasting his time, and invading his privacy,” it said.
PHE, owner of adult products website Adam & Eve, sends customers’ private and protected sexual information, plus their IP addresses, to Google Analytics without their consent, alleged a Jan. 3 privacy class action (docket 2:24-cv-01065) removed Wednesday from Los Angeles County Superior Court to U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles.
Digital Media Solutions places telemarketing calls, including calls that use prerecorded voice messages, to consumers throughout the U.S., in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, alleged Jeffrey Kathman’s class action Tuesday (docket 8:24-cv-00353) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Tampa. Digital Media Solutions is a "conglomerate" of digital marketing companies selling various products to consumers, and it also gathers and sells consumer leads to insurance and solar companies, said the complaint. The Parrish, Florida, resident listed his cellphone number on the national do not call registry in April 2014, yet he received multiple prerecorded calls from or on behalf of Digital Media Solutions “using a multitude of spoofed phone numbers that could not be called back,” his complaint alleges. Kathman estimates he received at least 11 calls from Digital Media Solutions soliciting him for Medicare supplemental insurance coverage. The calls have harmed Kathman “in the form of annoyance, nuisance, and invasion of privacy,” said the complaint. He seeks injunctive relief to halt the unlawful conduct, plus the recovery of damages and court costs.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for Southern New York in Manhattan signed an order Tuesday (dockets 1:23-cv-08292 and 1:23-cv-10211) appointing Lieff Cabraser, Susman Godfrey and Cowan DeBaets as the plaintiffs' interim co-lead counsel in the newly consolidated copyright infringement class action brought by 29 authors and the Authors Guild against Microsoft and OpenAI (see 2402050037). The authors allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their works and then fed them into their large language models, algorithms designed “to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.” Those algorithms are at the heart of the defendants’ “massive commercial enterprise,” and at the heart of these algorithms “is systematic theft on a mass scale,” alleges the complaint.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria for Northern California in San Francisco postponed Friday’s case management videoconference to Feb. 23 at 10 a.m. PST in the AirTags privacy class action against Apple (see 2401100047), said a text-only clerk’s notice Tuesday (docket 3:22-cv-07668). The 38 plaintiffs in the class action seek to hold Apple accountable for the growing use of the AirTag as a stalking device (see 2311140041). Apple contends that the 38 plaintiffs' allegations are “a misplaced effort to hold Apple legally responsible for third parties’ intentional misuse of its AirTag product” (see 2310300030).
The case total for class actions transferred to In Re: Moveit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation passed 200 since the first five were transferred to U.S. District Court for Massachusetts in Boston Oct. 4, said conditional transfer order 29 (CTO-29) (docket 3083) Tuesday from the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Some 197 additional actions have been transferred to the district and assigned to U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, it said. The five cases in CTO-29 include two vs. Delta Dental and one vs. Medical Eye Services and Blue Shield of California from the U.S. District Court for Northern California; one from U.S. District Court for Middle Florida against Enstar; and one from U.S. District Court for Southern Texas against Progress Software Corp. and Harris Health System. The cases all involve Progress Software’s May data breach affecting over 2,700 organizations and exposing the personally identifiable information of over 94 million individuals, according to data from Emsisoft.