Toyota broadsided by website tracking class action

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Toyota was hit with a “trap and trace” class action, over what the plaintiff calls an “outrageous privacy ‘bait and switch’ scheme.”

In a class action filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, lead plaintiff Brittany Conner claims the Japanese automaker “secretly tracks, de-anonymizes and sells visitors’ personnel information before a user can provide legally valid consent.”

When one goes to Toyota.com, he or see is greeted by a consent banner informing the visitor its websites use cookies and similar tracking technologies to enhance the user’s experience. The now familiar warning comes along with two buttons, “accept” and “decline.”

“Those tracking cookies enable the third parties to de-anonymize and track users’ online activities such as their browsing history, visit history, website interactions, user input data, demographic information, interests and preferences, shopping behaviors, device information, referring URLs, session information, user identifiers and geolocation data,” Conner says in the complaint.

Conner says she visited the Toyota website several times over the last few years, and “elected to reject all third-party cookies.” She says that the publicly traded company, founded in 1937, “nonetheless secretly installed tracking technology on plaintiff’s device” and caused her to be “tracked and surveilled while using the internet.”

The so-called “spyware,” Conner says in the complaint, “is used for advertising to consumers across devices, where a user is shown an ad on their mobile or tablet device based on websites they listed on a desktop.” She adds: “The spyware activities… are known as ‘fingerprinting.’ Put simply the spyware collects as much data as it can about an otherwise anonymous visitor to the website and matches it with existing data acquired and acclimated about hundreds of millions of Americans to identify the user and tailor marketing and advertising.”

She is represented by Scott Ferrell and Victoria Knowles of Pacific Trial Attorneys in Newport Beach, California. They did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

The class action is only the latest in a wave of recent litigation under the California Invasion of Privacy Act, or CIPA, a 1967 law aimed at banning wiretaps and hidden recording equipment. In the 2020s, plaintiffs began using CIPA to sue over website tracking. According to OneTrust, a software company that helps businesses comply with privacy laws, more than 800 CIPA claims were filed in 2025 alone.

In May, ForbesMedia agreed to pay $10 million to settle a “trap and trace” class action. The Los Angeles Times agreed to settle a similar lawsuit for $3.85 million. In recent month, DraftKings and the NFL were hit with website tracking lawsuits.

Toyota spokespeople did not return an email requesting a comment on the class action.

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