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| free to monitor via remote webcam spykit — for now. |
Jason Mick
Daily Tech
Some may recall that back in May news broke of an Aaron’s Inc. (AAN) franchisee remotely spying on users with a webcam to make sure they were making payments. The incident led to one outraged couple filing suit against the company, seeking class action status.
Unfortunately for that couple — Crystal and Brian Byrd — there case was dealt a serious setback by Judge Sean Mclaughlin, a judge with the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (Erie District).
In his ruling [Google Docs], the judge refused to grant a preliminary injunction, which would have banned Aaron’s and its franchisees from both continuing to monitor users with the “PC Rental Agent” remote webcam spykit and from conducting activities to obfuscate which computers had the spykit installed.
In denying the injunction, Judge Mclaughlin opens the door to continued monitoring of users, and to the company disguising how many users it monitors.
The court rules that that the plaintiffs don’t have the computer any more and thus are no longer suffering harm and that they provided insufficient evidence to demonstrate that other members of the potential class are currently suffering harm.
Basically the dilemma the Byrd family’s lawyers face in arguing their case is that no current employees are willing to whistle blow on their employer and discuss remote monitoring. Furthermore, the court is dismissing a former employee who did testify against the franchisee as non-credible in so much as they aren’t a present employee (“…given by Ms. Hittinger, and no other information about the current practices of Ms. Hittinger’s particular franchisee location were elicited. In fact, Ms. Hittinger no longer works at an Aaron’s…”).
The court seems content to take the Aaron’s franchisee at its word about how many computers its monitoring, while dismissing the plaintiff’s claims as speculative, writing:
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