Health insurance giant Anthem, Inc. agreed to the largest data breach settlement to-date last week, ending multi-district consumer litigation over a 2015 data breach for $115 million. The data breach, which resulted from a hacker-orchestrated cyberattack following the theft of an employee password, exposed personally identifiable information (“PII”) and protected health information (“PHI”) of nearly […]
Class Action
Northern District of Illinois Dismisses Barnes & Noble Data Breach Lawsuit
Earlier this month, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois entered an order dismissing with prejudice a putative class action concerning a security breach affecting PIN pad devices at numerous Barnes & Noble locations. The lawsuit, In re Barnes & Noble Pin Pad Litigation, No. 12-cv-8617 (N.D. Ill.), was brought by […]
Germany’s Christmas Present: Data-Protection Class Actions
Following the European Court of Justice’s Schrems decision invalidating the Safe Harbor mechanism, much attention has focused on how the Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) of EU member states would interpret and enforce Schrems. While close attention to DPA activity is important—and will become even more so upon the passage of the EU General Data Protection […]
Privacy Partner Dominique Shelton Authors Privacy Advisor Article on Hulu VPPA Case
Dominique Shelton, partner in Alston and Bird’s Privacy & Data Security practice and member of the Litigation and Trial Practice group, authored an article appearing on June 19 in International Association of Privacy Professionals’ (IAPP) Privacy Advisor titled, “Court Denies Class-Action in Hulu Case, But There’s More.” In the article, Shelton discusses the Hulu consumer class-action case […]
West Virginia High Court Finds Standing without Harm for Invasion of Privacy Claim in State Data Breach Class Action
The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals recently issued an important – but outlier – decision in a data breach class action. In a per curiam decision, the Court held that the plaintiffs had standing to bring their claims even though discovery revealed that not a single class member – much less the named plaintiffs […]