Friday, May 01, 2015

In the absence of actual harm, privacy cases are hardly worth pursuing

Continuing the theme of "don't bother unless you have actual losses ..."

In Albayate v. Bank of Montreal, 2015 BCSC 695, the plaintiff claimed against her bank for wrongly changing the address on their records and thus exposing her financial info to her former spouse. In short, the court found the bank mistakenly changed her address but the husband did not read her statement. He did not use them to her detriment. The bank apologized. End of story.

Her damages were assessed at a nominal $2000.

1 comment:

John Wunderlich said...

Two things:

1. Individuals can use small claims court for this kind of thing which, if it becomes known, will provide some interesting metrics as well as a continuing cost.

2. Class actions for large numbers of small claims are still expensive.

The upshot of these two should be better privacy programs over time.