California v. Comcast Cable Communications Management

Comcast Cable Communications Management, LLC (Comcast) (defendant) provided telephone services via the Internet. Comcast charged a monthly fee to keep a subscriber’s telephone number unlisted and private. Comcast sold all other numbers to a listing service that listed a subscriber’s name and phone number in an online directory. However, at one point, an internal Comcast error caused Comcast to sell all its phone numbers to the listing service, including around 75,000 phone numbers that subscribers had paid to keep unlisted. Comcast received complaints about the unlisted numbers being made public for one and a half years before it determined what had happened and had the private numbers pulled from the online listing. Comcast offered to refund the monthly fees to customers who had been affected. Approximately 200 people complained that they had needed their numbers unlisted for safety reasons. The California attorney general (plaintiff) sued Comcast, alleging violations of California’s false-advertising, unfair-competition, and public-utilities laws. The parties reached a proposed settlement in which Comcast agreed to (1) pay each affected subscriber $100 for a total of approximately $7.5 million, (2) pay an extra $432,000 to the subscribers who had safety issues, (3) pay $25 million to the state in penalties, and (4) be subject to an ongoing injunction order from the court. The injunction order required Comcast to take actions such as continuing to try to fix the existing disclosure, protecting the allowed listing information to ensure that the information was used properly by third parties, responding to complaints sooner and more thoroughly, and otherwise taking measures to avoid any future disclosures of private consumer data. The parties submitted this proposed settlement to the court for approval.