On Monday, February 12, a Southern District of Ohio district court dismissed two proposed class actions relating to an October 2012 Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. data breach. Galaria v. Nationwide Mutual Ins. Co., No. 2:13-cv-118 (S.D. Ohio Feb. 10, 2014); Hancox v. Nationwide Mutual Ins. Co., No. 2:13-cv-257 (S.D. Ohio Feb. 10, 2014). The court … Continue Reading
This week, in a 5-4 decision in Clapper et al. v. Amnesty International USA et al., the United States Supreme Court rejected two theories of Article III standing presented by a group of attorneys, human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations who sought a declaration that surveillance under section 1881a of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act … Continue Reading
The Seventh Circuit held yesterday, in a decision written by Judge Posner, that damages are not available under the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”) for violations of the statute’s data deletion requirement, only for unlawful disclosures of video-viewing information. Subsection (b) of the VPPA prohibits knowing disclosure of personally identifiable information that identifies a person … Continue Reading
Employees whose personal information might have been accessed in a data breach cannot sue the breached company in federal court based only on the possibility that the breach might lead to identity theft, a federal appeals court ruled Monday. The case, Reilly v. Ceridian Corporation, is a proposed class action brought by employees whose companies … Continue Reading
Class action lawsuits are increasingly being brought against organizations that have suffered data breaches, as well as against companies that are alleged to have allowed third parties access to online or mobile users’ confidential information without authorization (for example the recent Del Vecchio v. Amazon and Low v. LinkedIn cases). A repeated issue in these … Continue Reading
The United States District Court for the Western District of Seattle recently dismissed an online privacy case involving the alleged improper use of browser and Flash cookies in Del Vecchio v. Amazon. Finding that the plaintiff “simply not plead adequate facts to establish any plausible harm,” this opinion follows closely on the heels of several … Continue Reading
Judge Koh of the District Court for the Northern District of California recently granted LinkedIn’s motion to dismiss with leave to amend in Low v. LinkedIn. Covington represents LinkedIn in this case, in which Plaintiff alleges that he suffered injury by virtue of LinkedIn’s purported transmittal of a unique UserID to certain third parties as … Continue Reading
Yesterday, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted defendants’ motions to dismiss the consolidated, amended complaint in In re iPhone Application Litigation for lack of Article III standing, with leave to amend. In finding lack of standing, the Court stated that plaintiffs’ allegations were “clearly insufficient” as … Continue Reading
Last week, the Ninth Circuit issued two opinions in connection with the theft of an unencrypted laptop that contained personal information about Starbucks employees. First, the court held in a published opinion that Starbucks employees whose names, addresses and Social Security numbers were on the stolen computer could show that they had suffered enough injury … Continue Reading
