A California woman was surprised when she got an email from Nutrisystem last month, after casually browsing the company’s website. The problem, she alleges in a new lawsuit, is that she never gave the company her email address.

The woman, Amelia Ingrao, had never visited the site before, nor had she given the Pennsylvania-based diet company any of her personal information. But soon after her visit, she received an email from “Nutrisystem via SafeOpt.”

Ingrao “was shocked that her personal browsing history was now being sent to her by a company she never provided her email address,” according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week on her behalf in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

This digital intrusion was possible, according to court documents, because Nutrisystem participates in a “data co-op,” one that consists of thousands of websites and more than 150 million users’ data.

The lawsuit alleges that Nutrisystem sends advertisements to some website visitors like Ingrao who never gave their contact information to the company or consented to sharing their data across different websites via the “co-op,” which is called SafeOpt and is run by the ecommerce company AddShoppers. Ingrao’s attorney argues that this practice violates privacy laws in California, where Ingrao was living at the time.

Spokespeople for Nutrisystem and AddShoppers did not respond to requests for comment.

AddShoppers, which is based in North Carolina, is not named as a defendant in the Philadelphia lawsuit, but it was one in a similar lawsuit previously filed in federal court by Ingrao and another person. In that case, which a U.S. district court judge struck down, the plaintiffs sued Nutrisystem, AddShoppers, and Vivint, a home security company.

AddShoppers denies all allegations of wrongdoing, said general counsel David Hale.

“AddShoppers’ mission is to save shoppers time and money by bringing them timely offers from brands they love. We do not create ‘dossiers,’ and we do not collect sensitive data,” Hale said in a statement. “For the little information we collect and use on behalf of our brand clients, we offer easy opt-out mechanisms and a simple way to request deletion..”

Ingrao’s attorney Charles E. Schaffer of the Society Hill firm Levin Sedran & Berman wrote in the suit that AddShoppers “surreptitiously collects and pools the sensitive personal information provided by individuals to online retailers in confidence, creates dossiers on those individuals, and then tracks them across the internet to monitor their web browsing for its own financial benefit.”

While AddShoppers refers to these people as “authorized users,” Schaffer said these users never authorized the sharing of their data between partner companies.

In Ingrao’s case, for instance, Schaffer said she never agreed to the terms and conditions for AddShoppers nor for Nutrisystem.

Schaffer did not respond to The Inquirer’s requests for additional comment on the lawsuit, which is asking for Nutrisystem to pay Ingrao and any other affected consumers at least $5,000 for each time it violated privacy laws through its partnership with AddShoppers.

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