An Internet company that provides shopping cart software to online merchants has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it rented personal information about nearly one million customers of its merchants’ to marketers.
The settlement will bar use of the personal data the company has already collected, as well as future misrepresentations about the collection, use or disclosure of personally identifiable information.
Vision I Properties, LLC, doing business as CartManager International, provides shopping cart software and related services to thousands of online merchants. The shopping cart pages are designed to look like the other pages on the merchants’ sites, said the FTC, and typically display the merchants’ names and logos, but are actually located on the CartManager site.
According to the FTC, some of the merchants who used CartManager’s shopping cart and check out software made privacy pledges to their customers that information would not be sold or traded. But, said the FTC, CartManager collected and rented the personal information of nearly one million consumers who shopped at merchant sites. The FTC alleges that CartManager did not adequately inform consumers or merchants that it would collect and rent this information and that it acted knowing that renting the information was contrary to many merchants’ privacy policies.
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