TIMS FACING CLASSACTION LAWSUIT OVER LOCATION TRACKING.

TORONTO • Tim Hortons is facing a class-action lawsuit in Quebec over data collection issues in the company’s mobile ordering app, filed a day after four privacy watchdogs announced a joint investigation into the company’s overreach.

The court application filed by Montreal-based law firms LPC Advocat Inc. and Consumer Law Group on Tuesday, cites reporting by the Financial Post from earlier in June that revealed the Tim Hortons app was logging users’ location in the background when the app wasn’t open. The app was streaming GPS location data to Radar Labs Inc., a U.S. company that analyzes location data to infer where users live and work, and logs a person’s visits to one of Tim Hortons’ competitors, such as Starbucks Corp. or McDonald’s Corp.

Immediately after privacy commissioners for the federal government, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia announced their joint investigation on Monday, Tim Hortons said in a statement it has discontinued its practice of tracking users’ location when the app is not open.

“It certainly seems to be an implicit admission on their part that what they were doing was wrong,” said Joey Zukran, a consumer protection lawyer with LPC Advocat Inc., which specializes in class-action litigation.

Zukran said the lead plaintiff is a Montreal resident who works in the IT sector. He was a user of both the Tim Hortons and Burger King apps, and since both of those chains are owned by Toronto-based parent company Restaurant Brands International Inc., he was likely being tracked twice.

“I would say he’s a techsavvy guy, from my conversations with him. He was a customer of Tim Hortons, a customer of Burger King. He uses the app often… learning everything that transpired came as a big shock to him,” Zukran said.

Zukran said that simply stopping the practice of background location tracking isn’t enough because Tim Hortons’ parent company appears to have been tracking the lead plaintiff since last year, and the damage is already done.

Tim Hortons’ chief corporate officer Duncan Fulton said in an emailed statement the company did not have any comment on the class-action lawsuit, and reiterated that it had discontinued background location tracking, although the app may still record user location when it’s open.

“Since Tim Hortons launched our mobile app, our guests always had the choice of whether they share location data with us, including ‘always’ sharing location data — an option offered by many companies on their own apps,” Fulton said.

Ostensibly, the lawsuit is asking for a $100 penalty, but the key point, according to Consumer Law Group lawyer Jeff Orenstein, is that they are asking the court to award punitive damages.