An employee of Starbucks has filed a class action lawsuit against the company for failing to properly secure employee data. The employee was one of one of 97,000 notified late last year after a Starbucks laptop containing employee names, addresses and Social Security numbers was stolen. [NetworkWorld via Starbucks Gossip]
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Comments:
@Vanilla5: Certainly anyone notified by Starbucks would be part of at least one class. Starbucks has made offers to people, so that should be enough to qualify if this goes through.
@Vanilla5: In order to recover a loss, yes, but I think they could get punative damages if it is just shown that Starbucks was negligent with their personal info.
@Vanilla5: I would hope they have to show someone's identity was stolen or credit impacted. If 60k people were effected and not one has a credit blemish in 3 year, this lawsuit is pretty baseless. The original "theft" may not even have been a theft. Starbucks claims it has no idea where the missing laptops are. They could have been tossed.
@Corporate_guy: Perhaps today that is the case, I don't know the laws where the suit is filed but once the new privacy regulations kick in in MA (latest deadline was pushed to 01/01/10)the company has a legal responsibility to protect private information. Specifically -storing Private Information on an un-encrypted laptop is a violation and would open you up to lawsuits if the laptop was lost or stolen even if the Personal Information is never used to commit credit fraud identity theft etc.
@Vanilla5: For individual damages, yes, but I think for a class-action suit the eventual award will be a $10 gift certificate or something.
Would one have to prove that their identity was stolen or their credit was impacted to move forward with this?