By Kenneth Corbin
Four lawsuits filed recently in California accuse large financial services firms and a cosmetics company of secretly collecting users' online activity and sharing that information with advertising-technology players such as Alphabet's Google and Microsoft.
A California man recently filed a lawsuit against Morgan Stanley accusing the Wall Street giant of improperly enabling the collection of user data from its website through third-party tracking tools. Data collected included information about sensitive online searches, he claims. It is at least the third such case Taajudin Elmarouk has brought against a large corporation.
Elmarouk is seeking class-action certification in the Morgan Stanley lawsuit, which was filed April 23, as well as similar litigation targeting Fidelity Investments, filed April 2, and cosmetics company Estée Lauder, filed Dec. 23, 2025.
In each case, Elmarouk alleges that the company "surreptitiously" employs tracking software that monitors the online activity of visitors to its website without providing notice or obtaining consent. He alleges that the companies' practices violate California law and that Morgan Stanley and Fidelity also run afoul of the Federal Wiretap Act, a law that governs the interception of communications.
In each of the three cases the plaintiff is seeking an injunction, as well as damages, interest, and legal fees.
Morgan Stanley and Fidelity declined to comment on the litigation. Estée Lauder didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Elmarouk couldn't immediately be reached for contact, and his lawyers didn't respond to questions about the litigation or if they are planning future similar lawsuits.
Another case. A different group of lawyers brought a similar claim against Edward Jones in February, also in the Northern District of California, a state with some of the nation's most stringent privacy laws.
The lawsuits name different third-party tracking software allegedly used by the defendants, but in each case describe tools that intercept users' Web browsing data when they visit the defendants' sites. In the Morgan Stanley case, Elmarouk alleges that the tracking tools obtained the "content of his communications and reveal[ed] his interest in debt solutions, LGBTQ opportunities, and mental illness analysis."
By snaring the addresses of the sites users are visiting, the complaint alleges, Morgan Stanley aims to further its "commercial objectives," including behavioral profiling and monetizing users' browsing activity.
The Fidelity and Estée Lauder complaints allege the same pattern of secretive tracking. Each of the complaints alleges that the defendants used a tool known alternately as a pixel tracker or Web beacon, tiny images embedded into a website to track user activity.
The information is then allegedly relayed to third-party tech companies that provide the tracking tools such as Microsoft, Google, and The Trade Desk, which are the three tech companies cited (but not named as defendants) in the Morgan Stanley lawsuit.
Those companies then "use the intercepted contents of users' communications collected via the website for their own independent purposes tied to broader advertising ecosystems, profiling, and data-monetization strategies, which go beyond [the] defendant's direct needs, for their own financial gain," the Morgan Stanley complaint states.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 30, 2026 13:44 ET (17:44 GMT)
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