I.C. v. Zynga, Inc.
- Yvonne Rogers
- 4:20-cv-01539
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In I.C. v. Zynga, Inc., Judge Rogers compelled arbitration for three plaintiffs and granted dismissal for lack of standing, allowing amendment.
Amy Gitre, Lisa Thomas, and Joseph Martinez IV were ordered to arbitrate their claims. The claims of I.C., Carol Johnson, Daniel Petro, and Christopher Rosiak were dismissed for lack of Article III standing, with leave to amend.
What happened
I.C. v. Zynga, Inc. concerns claims arising from Zynga’s September 2019 customer-database data breach. Seven plaintiffs filed a consolidated class-action complaint asserting 27 causes of action. Zynga asked to compel arbitration for Amy Gitre, Lisa Thomas, and Joseph Martinez IV, and asked to dismiss the claims of I.C., Carol Johnson, Daniel Petro, and Christopher Rosiak.
The court found that Gitre, Thomas, and Martinez entered arbitration agreements through Zynga’s clickwrap terms, which required users to accept presented terms. The agreements also clearly assigned questions about whether arbitration applied to an arbitrator. The court did not decide the plaintiffs’ challenges to the arbitration agreement as a whole because those challenges had not specifically attacked the delegation provision. For the other plaintiffs, the court found that the complaint did not adequately allege a concrete injury, including an invasion of privacy or a sufficient risk of future harm.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted Zynga’s motion to compel arbitration as to Gitre, Thomas, and Martinez. She also granted Zynga’s motion to dismiss the remaining plaintiffs’ claims for lack of Article III standing, with leave to amend. The plaintiffs were ordered to file an amended complaint by August 27, 2021, and Zynga was allowed to respond and, if standing was adequately alleged, reassert its merits challenge subject to the limits stated by the court.
The detailed version
- I.C. v. Zynga, Inc. · No. 4:20-cv-01539
- Yvonne Rogers
- July 30, 2021
Background
The case arose from a September 2019 breach of Zynga’s customer database, which allegedly contained personal identifying information. The case consolidated four individual actions. After an earlier denial of Zynga’s motions to compel arbitration without prejudice, the court allowed Zynga to conduct discovery about the plaintiffs’ Zynga accounts and the terms of service that applied to them.
On March 12, 2021, I.C., Amy Gitre, Carol Johnson, Lisa Thomas, Joseph Martinez IV, Daniel Petro, and Christopher Rosiak filed a consolidated class-action complaint asserting 27 causes of action related to the breach. Zynga renewed its motion to compel arbitration as to Gitre, Thomas, and Martinez. It also moved to dismiss the claims of I.C., Johnson, Petro, and Rosiak for lack of Article III standing and failure to state a claim.
Arbitration ruling
The court granted the motion to compel arbitration as to Gitre, Thomas, and Martinez. It found that those plaintiffs entered into arbitration agreements with Zynga through clickwrap terms—online terms that require a user to click an acceptance button after being presented with terms and conditions. The court concluded that the agreements gave users access to the terms and sufficiently showed their agreement.
The court also found that the arbitration agreements clearly and unmistakably delegated questions of arbitrability—questions about whether a dispute must be arbitrated—to the arbitrator. The court rejected the argument that a reference to “the court” in another subsection created a conflict with that delegation. It further found that the plaintiffs had not made a challenge specifically directed at the delegation clause. Because their unconscionability and other challenges addressed the arbitration agreement as a whole, the court left those issues for the arbitrator.
Standing ruling
The court granted the motion to dismiss for lack of Article III standing, with leave to amend. Article III standing requires a plaintiff to allege a sufficiently concrete injury. The court found that the complaint, as then written, did not sufficiently allege an invasion of privacy or a sufficient risk of future harm based on the information allegedly stolen in the breach.
The court directed the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint and an accompanying redline by August 27, 2021. Zynga was directed to respond by September 20, 2021. If the amended complaint survived another standing challenge, Zynga could reassert its challenge to the merits, but it could not raise grounds that it could have raised in the motion decided by this order. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that the order terminated Docket Nos. 71 and 72.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.