Kight

Plaintiffs brought individual and class claims against CashCall, Inc., a consumer finance company, alleging CashCall secretly monitored their telephone conversations with CashCall employees without plaintiffs’ knowledge or consent. Plaintiffs alleged this practice violated their common law, statutory, and constitutional privacy rights. The court certified a class on one of these claims, an alleged violation of Penal Code 1 section 632, which imposes liability on a person (defined to include a “corporation”) who intentionally “eavesdrops upon or records [a] confidential communication” and engages in this conduct “without the consent of all parties.”

CashCall successfully moved for summary adjudication on the section 632 claim. The court found as a matter of law a corporation does not violate the statute when one of its supervisory employees secretly monitors a conversation between a customer and another corporate employee. The court agreed with CashCall’s argument that section 632 did not apply because the eavesdropping prohibited under the statute requires a third party and there were only two parties to the alleged monitored conversations—the corporation and the…