Judge David O. Carter, in the Central District of California dismissed a data privacy class action for lack of personal jurisdiction. Plaintiff, a California resident, alleged that a corporate defendant used data broker software on its website to collect visitor information, which was then sent to a third-party data broker for profiling and tracking. The plaintiff claimed these actions violated California’s Trap and Trace Law and sought to represent a class of similarly affected individuals.
Jurisdictional Analysis
The court examined both general and specific jurisdiction. General jurisdiction was quickly ruled out, as the defendant was incorporated in Delaware, maintained its principal place of business outside California, and had no significant operations or assets in the state.
Turning to specific jurisdiction, the court applied the Ninth Circuit’s “effects test,” which requires that a defendant’s intentional acts be expressly aimed at the forum state and cause harm that the defendant knows is likely to be suffered there. The court found that the plaintiff failed to demonstrate that the defendant purposefully directed its conduct toward California or exploited a California consumer base for commercial gain. Notably, the court distinguished this case from recent precedent where the defendant’s direct involvement in data collection and targeting of California residents was clearly established.
The Court finds that under the analysis presented in Briskin v. Shopify, Defendant’s behavior does not satisfy the Effects Test. Briskin v. Shopify (“Briskin”), 135 F.4th 739 (9th Cir. 2025). In Briskin, an online merchant sent a customer’s personal information to Shopify’s servers. Id. at 748. The Ninth Circuit found that Briskin had “made a prima facie showing of jurisdictional facts sufficient to establish that Shopify purposely directed its conduct toward California.” Id. at 755. The Ninth Circuit found instrumental in its reasoning that “Shopify knows about its California residents, interacts with them as an intermediary for its merchants, installs its software onto their devices in California, and continues to track their activities.” Id. at 759. This information was important in conjunction with the Court’s previous ruling in Mavrix Photo, Inc. v. Brand Techs., Inc. (“Mavrix Photo”), in which the Ninth Circuit had held that a “company’s internet activity may subject the company to specific personal jurisdiction in a given forum if the company ‘knows – either actually or constructively’ about its customer base there and ‘exploits that base for commercial gain.’ ” Id. (quoting Mavrix Photo, 647 F.3d 1218, 1230 (9th Cir. 2011)). In the present case, Plaintiffs have not shown that the Defendant exploited their Californian consumer base for commercial gain to the same degree as Shopify did in Briskin.
Plaintiff further argues that 6Sense extracting personal information of those who visit Defendant’s website is analogous to the behavior of Shopify (Dkt. 14 at 28). But critically, Plaintiff has not made 6Sense party to the present case. Therefore, the present case is disanalogous to Briskin, where the Defendant was not the host website, but the party that was collecting information on Californians (Shopify). Briskin v. Shopify, Inc., 135 F.4th 739, 755-761 (9th Cir. 2025). Accordingly, the Court finds that Plaintiff fails the first prong of the Effects Test and therefore lacks personal jurisdiction.
Travis Rounds v. Dev. Dimensions Int’l, Inc. et al., No. 8:25-CV-01975-DOC-ADS, 2025 WL 4055402 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 15, 2025).
