A new class action lawsuit claims the company that operates personal information search site GoLookUp has violated Illinois privacy law by allegedly profiting from aggregating people's personal information and allegedly selling it online to people willing to pay for their background scraping services.
The lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on May 11 by named plaintiffs Tiffany Bryant and Lachrisia Jakes on behalf of themselves and others. It accuses Lucky2Media, which does business as GoLookUp, of violations against the Illinois Right to Privacy Act (IRPA) for allegedly using individuals' personal identity for commercial purposes without first gaining their express consent.
A Delaware based internet company, GoLookUp is a public data aggregation service providing "free peeks" to guests, but for its paid customers, comprehensive personal information about individuals can be obtained through paid subscriptions or single use fees. GoLookUp claims it is able to search millions of public records databases to obtain detailed, personal information about an individual a customer wishes to search.
Through a process, known interchangeably in the industry as web scraping, data mining, web harvesting and data extraction, GoLookUp collects, stores, and retrieves website data into a usable format, such as in a spreadsheet or databases. According to the complaint, businesses can use this information by converting unstructured data on the internet into organized, structured data. Businesses frequently use scraping internally for due diligence, comparative/competitive analysis, tracking purposes and more, leveraging the information mined through mostly automated means such as bots and crawlers to attempt to gain competitive advantages.
However, in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim GoLookUp improperly uses those processes for commercial profit. The IRPA law allows such information to be gathered and used by GoLookUp and other scraping services like Spokeo, Whitepages, Inteli, Been Verified, Instant Checkmate, and others, so long as it is not using that information commercially, for monetizing purposes.
Similar lawsuits have been filed in the past against other personal information gathering sites, including Instant Checkmate, Whitepages, Spokeo, BeenVerified and Intelius, all centered on the same basic complaint: Users were allegedly lured with free public record information only to be enticed to get the motherlode if they are willing to pay for a monthly subscription or a 5-day use fee for the privilege of viewing and using, deep level extracted data containing detailed personal information including phone numbers, financial information, family members, addresses and more.
The suit contends the enticement coming with a free simple search viewing at no charge, was used for monetary gain to attract new paid services for customers, and did so without the express, prior consent of the individual whose information was being collected, allegedly violating IRPA.
Both named plaintiffs, Bryant and Jakes, each attested that in March of 2023 they discovered their information had been aggregated by GoLookUp and allegedly used for allegedly improper commercial purposes.
The fate of the suit against GoLookUp remains unclear, based on past similar lawsuits.
Some of the prior lawsuits failed.
Others, however, have bested attempts to dismiss. Notably, a 2020 decision from a federal judge in a similar class action allowed lawsuits to continue against Instant Checkmate and Whitepages. That decision appears to have paved the way for potentially more lawsuits, as with GoLookUp.
With regard to the lawsuit vs InstantCheckmate, U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman, described InstantCheckmate's process as “a textbook example under the IRPA of using a person’s identity for a commercial purpose.” The company had claimed the law does not apply because the preview only displayed publicly available information. The judge, however, ruled the law covers all aspects of a person’s identity, without distinguishing whether the information came from public or private sources.
Plaintiffs are seeking actual and punitive damages, court costs and legal fees.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against GoLookUp are represented by Attorney Patrick J. Solberg of Anderson + Wanca, Rolling Meadows.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuits against InstantCheckmate and Whitepages are represented by attorneys with the firm of Beaumont Costales, of Chicago.