Toyota has been tracking its website visitors without their consent

In the world of modern technology, user privacy is only becoming a bigger issue and more disputed by the day.

It's very much to the benefit of OEMs to collect as much user data as is possible, as every added tidbit of information helps them get an edge when it comes to the ability to sell interested users a vehicle. Though privacy on the internet can very much operate in the gray area of morality, automakers still do everything they can to harvest details about buyer habits and interests as is possible.

Toyota is the latest offender of such practices, and a proposed class-action lawsuit accuses the automaker of not respecting users' privacy rights when visiting its website.

The familiar pop-up prompts to accept or reject third-party tracking cookies on a website aren't there for show. It's a real way in which website users can (and should) consent or not to the website owner collecting valuable data about the person visiting the website in question.

From this information, a website can aggregate user preferences that in turn help make business decisions. But even when you deny the website from tracking your actions, "fingerprinting" can still do so-and that's exactly what Toyota was doing, a newly proposed class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles alleges.

In essence, "fingerprinting" takes multiple pieces of data that the browser collects from a given device. This usually includes operating system, hardware, and so on, which allows the website to transmit user info that in turn allows for more precisely targeted ads served directly to your eyeballs. Of course, this is outright illegal should you deny the website the right to collect said data, thanks largely to precedent set by the 1967 California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), which set out to prevent wiretapping.