Gainesville website compliance lawsuits
Hello from Gainesville, Florida. It's Monday, October 5, and you're listening to StreetSmart. I'm Lillian Hamman. StreetSmart is a weekly podcast from Mainstreet Daily News, where we cover local news that informs, engages, and inspires listeners like you. Here's the top headlines we're following.
Lillian:The Gainesville City Commission passed its final vote to end roam towing and immobilizations. Starting January 1, tow companies will need to be called or emailed by a property owner or their designee in order to tow an illegally parked vehicle.
Lillian:The city of Alachua was sued for $10,000,000 last week. It's the latest in a years long back and forth between the city and a developer trying to build near the Mill Creek Sink. The developer says the city refuses to schedule a hearing for its application and has continued changing the criteria for a successful infrastructure plan.
Lillian:Grace Marketplace announced that its board of directors has promoted interim CEO Mark Bonner as the permanent chief executive officer. The appointment comes after the previous CEO left in June after seven months.
Lillian:A Gainesville police department detective was arrested by the FBI last week. He's charged with leaking confidential information to drug traffickers who were under investigation along with other misuse of police
Lillian:data. Code violations at the Majestic Oaks apartments could cost the complex $278,000 The violations came in seven different units and Alachua County said the issues have since been resolved.
Lillian:The Florida Museum of Natural History announced that it would reopen on November 23 after twenty two months of construction and renovations. The Butterfly Rainforest and other cornerstone exhibits will return along with new and refreshed offerings. For more details on what those renovations include and any other information for these stories, you can visit mainstreetdailynews.com. Every day we're adding new information to keep you informed and it's all free with no paywall. Thanks to our generous members.
Lillian:Welcome to another episode of the StreetSmart podcast. I'm Lillian Hammond, and with me is cohost Seth Johnson. Last year, the two of us shared our first byline for a story in December about some ADA compliant lawsuits circulating around the city. Seth, it's been so long ago. Do you remember doing that story?
Seth:Yeah. I remember because it made a pretty big impact. That became one of our top stories of the year very quickly and caused a couple of follow-up stories into the beginning of this year because of all the feedback we were getting.
Lillian:And now, we're seeing almost like a virus, kind of a new strain of similar types of lawsuits. And you just covered that story last week, and that's what we're gonna talk about on our feature story for today.
Seth:Yeah. We're jumping right into it. And it's not something that's completely brand new. I mean, these types of lawsuits where it's a single person suing a lot of businesses or individuals for kind of the same issue, you know, has been happening for a while, but it's just been striking the Gainesville community in a couple different waves here recently. I mean, the things that are in common, like I said, was, you know, it's a single plaintiff.
Seth:They're suing for the exact same reason, so the lawsuits are copy and paste, and then they put in the new name of the business. So, you know, we're suing business a for this, and then they just copy business b, business c, business d. And so, it's not a lot of, you know, new arguments each time. And then, obviously, they're similar because it's website compliance. So for the ones we did last year, it was with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Seth:So saying that these websites, you know, couldn't interact with text to speech readers for people who are vision impaired. This time around, it's with tracking and cookies.
Lillian:Now, Seth, are those chocolate chip, peanut butter, Oreo? What what kind of cookies?
Seth:They're slightly different cookies than that. These are not oven baked cookies. They're website cookies used for tracking.
Lillian:Okay. I I would have been remiss if I passed up that opportunity for a cookie dough.
Seth:You're hungry this morning, aren't you? I am. However, there's some pretty big differences between, you know, this slate of lawsuits and the ones before. For this wave, it was a lot smaller settlement. So they filed in small claims court in Miami, and so the maximum reward is $8,000 versus the ADA.
Seth:Some people were settling for $20,000, you know, something in that figure. The other difference is that the plaintiff for those ADA lawsuits lived here in Gainesville. But for this one, it's someone who lives in Miami, and they're suing all across the state. So even though they lived in Miami, when I went through the list of... It's around a 180 businesses statewide who've been sued for this.
Seth:All of them were in either Tampa or Orlando, which is, you know, four hours away from Miami or even further away, you know, Ocala, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee. So even though he lives in Miami, he's not suing people in Miami necessarily. That goes back to what some of the business owners I talked to said was that these lawsuits seem aimed to just get a quick settlement and they're not actually concerned about website privacy, even though that's what they claim.
Lillian:How many people have been impacted by these lawsuits? And also, how did you come across this story?
Seth:So there are 29 Gainesville based businesses or branches that I was able to find. So I had to wade through all, you know, a 180 something lawsuits on the clerk of the court website in order to find them. Because a lot of these were medical establishments, and so it was hard to really distinguish where they were located. Unless they said, you know, Gainesville Dermatology, you know, you didn't really know. However, there's some other businesses in there too.
Seth:Butler Plaza has been sued, and that case is still open. There's also one against Celebration Point. There was one against Cymed Health, one against Radian Credit Union, but the vast majority were some kind of medical related. So, you know, dentists or eye doctors or dermatology, something along those lines. So I heard about it back in August, but the one business I knew that had been impacted didn't wanna talk about it.
Seth:So I looked in all three federal court districts in Florida but wasn't able to find these lawsuits. And then I checked, you know, the Alachua County, courts and wasn't able to find these lawsuits. So I was like, I don't know where these are coming from. Maybe it's, you know, not this massive amount of lawsuits. And then another business owner reached out in September, and she gave the name of the plaintiff along with the court, the fact that he's from Miami Dade.
Seth:And so I was able to finally find the lawsuits in Miami Dade County when I put in his name, and then all these lawsuits pop up. I was able to talk with a couple local business owners about it, and they kind of all said something similar. Like, it seems like it shouldn't be something that you're able to sue over. It seems like a super technical violation or not even a violation, but by the time you find out you're sued, there's already a pre conference trial set for Miami in maybe a week, maybe two weeks. You know, do you hire a lawyer who's gonna want several thousand dollars, or do you reach out and negotiate a settlement that could be lower than $8,000 and save yourself the time and trouble?
Seth:And so, Kristen Roberts, who's the vice president with Cymed Health, said, you know, we would love to fight this on a principal level because it's, you know, something that we disagree with. But from a business matter for, you know, our patients and doctors and employees, you know, it doesn't make sense to fight this. Dave Barber of Dave Barber's Paint and Body right off of 6th Street, you know, they're a second generation business. His father started it in 1965 with $500, he told me. And they've, you know, employed his uncles and his grandfather, now him, And he said it just blew his mind when he got a lawsuit.
Seth:He was thinking, what did I do to somebody that I'm getting sued? And then it was website compliance and cookies they had, you know, no idea about. And so they ended up settling as well.
Lillian:That reminds me of one of the interesting things that I remember from the ADA story was a lot of those businesses sometimes had their own specific teams looking at just website compliance, you know, specifically just the ADA compliance. But they would still get sued even with that sometimes.
Seth:Right. Having an IT person look through your website isn't a 100% guarantee that there's not some technical violation that someone might try and sue over. In these cases, it looked like they were using some kind of scanning program to go through a website and see, you know, the probability that a website, was or was not in compliance. For this case, I reached out to the UF Levin College of Law, and I was able to speak to a professor there. And her opinion, when she first started looking over it, was they're not really trying to vindicate real rights.
Seth:It's kind of going after that settlement again. However, as she continued looking at it, she said, I don't think this kind of has standing. And she looked up the law that they were kind of using, which is Florida Security Communications Act, which is primarily dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping, and then it's included kind of electronic communications as well. And she said, because these lawsuits are talking about website tracking, it has to do with the metadata of a conversation. So it's not what was said.
Seth:It's this information about when they accessed the website, how long, where they were coming from. She said that type of metadata or trap and trace technologies that are used, Florida law doesn't give civil court as a remedy. So her opinion is that these lawsuits aren't allowed to be filed in civil court. But if people just keep settling and no one goes to fight it, then it never gets figured out. And so, even if her opinion is correct, you know, these don't have a basis for civil lawsuits, A lot of people have settled already and have paid money because of it.
Lillian:Interesting to learn about the connections between these two types of website compliance lawsuits, and it'll be interesting to see what comes.
Seth:Alright. Let's get straight into our news forecast, and then Lillian will follow-up with our events segment. The Alachua City Commission will convene tonight at 6PM and discuss data centers and its fiscal budget. Alachua County has two special meetings scheduled for tomorrow, the first at 10AM and the second at 01:30PM. One of the big topics will be amendment three and its impact to the county.
Seth:Gainesville's general policy committee, which is made up of the full city commission, will meet on Thursday afternoon at 1PM.
Lillian:Now for our event segment with plenty of family friendly events this week. The University of Florida homecoming parade will strike through downtown Gainesville on Friday starting at noon. The parade will run along University Avenue from 13th Street near campus to Main Street in the downtown. If you're driving in the area on Friday, be aware that you may need to detour to get where you're going.
Lillian:The Newberry Lions Club will host the Roaring Retro Market on Friday and Saturday at the Alachua County Agriculture and Equestrian Center. The market will include antiques, collectibles, crafts, and one of a kind finds.
Lillian:The Macintosh flea market is happening Saturday. It'll run from 8AM to 2PM and feature a rotating mix of vendors, antiques, collectibles, and secondhand finds.
Lillian:Alachua Conservation Trust will showcase artists outside in its Goldenrod Gallery at the Micanopy Native American Heritage Preserve. The event runs from 10AM to 2PM, Saturday.
Lillian:The Oaks Mall is gathering great eats for its fall food truck festival on Saturday from noon to 8PM with dozens of local vendors featuring crafts, apparel, art, accessories, and unique finds plus live entertainment.
Lillian:And another event you can add to your calendar is an exclusive Mainstreet Daily News event tomorrow at 11:45AM. It's called Behind the Headlines.
Seth:You'll be able to hear from Lillian here along with our photojournalist Walker Smith who's on for a special bonus episode a month ago, along with education reporter Nick Anschultz, as they talk about their reporting and what's been going on in Gainesville and Alachua County, along with what it takes to run a newsroom.
Lillian:Yeah. Our publisher, JC Derrick, will also be there, and we are inviting any and all questions about what we should be covering, what issues are important to you and your community that we should bring attention to, and what we can do better.
Seth:So again, that's gonna be tomorrow. It starts at 11:45, but you can get there at 11:30 at Elder Options. So that's off of Tower Road, very close to the Home Depot.
Lillian:And that's all we've got for this week's StreetSmart podcast, brought to you by Mainstreet Daily News and made possible by our generous members. You can access more free news at mainstreetdailynews.com. We'll be back next week with more stories that matter to you because they take place right here in Alachua County. Take a minute to share StreetSmart and help us continue the work. Our theme music is Sunset Sonata by Gainesville's Ska Band, Now Leaving Space.
Lillian:This episode is a production of MARC Media.
