Best Buy Sued for Allegedly Selling Customers' Personal Data

Best Buy is facing a new class action lawsuit that accuses the electronics retailer of secretly selling its customers' personal information to advertisers without telling them.

The lawsuit, filed in Minnesota federal court by plaintiff Corlis Moon, alleges Best Buy collected personal details from shoppers — names, addresses, phone numbers, and full purchase histories — and sold that data to outside companies for profit. According to the complaint, customers were never told this was happening, not even in Best Buy's own privacy policy.

At the center of the case is Best Buy Ads, the company's advertising network. The lawsuit alleges it lets brands buy access to Best Buy's customer data and run targeted ads straight at shoppers. To pull this off, the complaint says Best Buy used a "data clean room" run by a company called LiveRamp, which combines Best Buy's customer info with its own records to build detailed profiles of individual shoppers.

And the profiling is the part that gets uncomfortable. According to the lawsuit, Best Buy Ads claims to track 15,000 different attributes about its customers and says it can tie 93% of its sales back to specific people. The complaint describes Best Buy following a customer from the first time they click a social media ad all the way through their purchases and repairs.

The case is being brought under Virginia's Personal Information Privacy Act, which generally requires companies to give notice before selling customer data to third parties. The plaintiff is a Virginia shopper, but the proposed class reaches Best Buy customers across the country whose information was funneled through the clean room and sold.

The lawsuit is seeking $100 in damages per violation for each affected customer, plus an order forcing Best Buy to hand over the profits it made.

There's no settlement yet — this is a brand new case that still has to play out in court. But if it moves forward, a lot of Best Buy shoppers could be affected.

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