Top of Forbes.com homepage, and bottom showing privacy consent choices (as seen by UK users) Forbes has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit in California relating to its use of third-party website trackers. The trackers on Forbes.com collected IP addresses and other unique identifiers from visitors, which those bringing the lawsuit argued constituted unauthorised use of “pen registers” and “trap and trace devices” under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. A “pen register” is a “device or process that records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information” while a “trap and trace device” is one that captures incoming information that can “identify the originating number or other dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information reasonably likely to identify the source of a wire or electronic communication, but not the contents of a communication”. The two plaintiffs, who brought the case on their behalf and others who may have been similarly affected, accused Forbes of installing trackers on its website including the Linkedin Insight Tag, the Bing Universal Event Tracking Tag and the Adnx Tracker, …