NYC law on sharing food delivery customers’ data is unconstitutional, judge rules

NEW YORK -A federal judge on Tuesday declared unconstitutional a New York City law requiring food delivery companies to share customer data with restaurants, saying the requirement violated the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan ruled in favor of DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats, which said the law violated the privacy rights of customers and threatened their data security.

A spokesperson for the city’s law department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The law required the delivery companies to provide restaurants with diners’ names, delivery addresses, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as order contents.

New York City adopted the law in the summer of 2021, one of multiple measures to help its thousands of restaurants recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city agreed that year not to enforce the law while the delivery companies sued, even as it argued that the law helped protect restaurants from the companies’ “exploitive practices.”

But in a 31-page decision, Torres said the law improperly regulated commercial speech.

She said the city did not show it had a substantial interest in ensuring that restaurants collect customer data from the delivery companies, and that it had less intrusive means to achieve that goal.

These means included letting customers decide whether to share data, offering financial incentives for the delivery companies to share data, and subsidizing online ordering platforms for individual restaurants, the judge said.

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