Can You Sue Over Loss of Personal Information? 479
GreenCrackBaby asks: "My wife was at a mall about a year ago when she ran across one of those groups who were trying to sign people up for a Visa credit card. Since she didn't yet have a credit card, she decided she'd fill out the form. She had everything filled out and was ready to sign it when she noticed the draconian fine print that essentially promised that they would sell her personal data to anyone they could, so instead of signing the form she said 'no thanks' and tossed it in the garbage. That was a mistake she has been made to regret. Almost immediately SPAM to her university email address went from 0 to 20 a day, and has been slowly increasing since. Soon we started to receive a large number of telemarketing calls to our home (where before we had received almost none). Junk mail addressed to her went through the roof. It wasn't until the Visa card arrived addressed to her that we knew what had happened." It appears that someone fished this woman's application out of the garbage and submitted this anyways, without a signature. How is something like this even close to being legal?
"What has become clear is that someone selling those Visas fished her application out from the garbage and submitted it. We've managed to track down a copy of the form she had filled out, and in the signature area is a big 'N/A'. So now her personal information is being sold to every telemarketer, spammer, and junk mail shop in North America. What can she do? We'd like to sue the company who fished the application from the garbage and make a lesson out of them, but what is there to sue over? Is the loss of personal information even considered a tort?"
Paper Shredders (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do groups go dumpster diving?
Never throw out paper that has information on you that you do not want to get out. Plus tearing up the form would have felt good at the time. It is not legal because the form needed a signature. The company should have the form stored you might be able to request it as evidence in a suit but you need to talk to lawyer.
I think importantly people need to look at what happened here and realise, do not trust the law to protect you, in most cases the law needs to be broken before it can be used, and the deterents in this case are small compared to the profit. So protect yourselve with the best practices that you can. Don't throw out paper information unless you have torn it up, burnt it or shredded or are safe with it being found at the tip, dump, skip, bin, etc.
In Europe this would be clearly illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
The company could be fined, and the directors could go to jail.
Then again, in the UK companies used to be required to provide a "please don't sell my personal data" check box ("opt-out"). I'm not sure whether this is still legal, or whether the European law has tightened this so it has to be a "please *DO* sell my personal data" check box ("opt-in"). So she would have been able to apply without getting spam.
#include "disclaimer/IANAL.h"
Similar thing happened to my brother, but no form (Score:4, Interesting)
Stuff like this makes you doubt the quality of our judgment when we put high tech into hands of the masses. Like handing a gun to a baby.
Worried about all the wrong things eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's what I would do ...
- Order a 3 in 1 credit report and check if fraudulent accounts have been opened in her name.
- Put a credit alert on her SSN with all 3 credit reporting agencies, make it that much harder for fraudulent accounts to appear on this account.
- Sign up for one of those services that notify you whenever there is any change to your credit file. (I use Credit Secure from Amex).
And please people, if you dont shred personal information before you toss it into the garbage, there is no sense it complaining about unethical businesses. Hell, I even shred credit card offers that come in the mail that I did not fill out, call me paranoid.Well, my 2c worth.
Re:Your wife made it public (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably not much you can do about it though without paying tons in lawyer fees. Sure would be nice if there was some hefty jail time for the person who did this. Putting the companies involved under a microscope for a long time would not be a bad idea either.
This happened to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
Same scenario, I applied for a credit card at one of those folding table operations where they have some crappy t-shirt or something that they'll give you for filling out applications. Anyhow, I needed a card, so I filled out an application for one of the three cards that this table was offering. They pushed me and asked that I apply for all 3 but I declined, saying that I only wanted one card, and didn't need three.
I went on my way and a couple of weeks later, I get all 3 of the cards in the mail. This pissed me off more than a little, as I am sure that there must be more than one law against falsifying financial documents.
I placed calls to the customer service numbers at the two cards that I had not applied for and told them my story. In both cases I was fed a line about the applications being un-trackable.
Now, this may or may not have been true, but the real information that I took away from the experience is that the companies didn't care about this kind of behavior. Disappointing, but you have to look at the angle - how will caring about this make them any money?
The people that run these tables are paid per application. If they are not made accountable for this kind of thing, why wouldn't they do it?
So good luck, but personally I'd just get a good spam filter and be glad that it was just false submission of your data and not identity theft or something like that.
My story (Score:4, Interesting)
I did the following: wrote, in large black marker across the application, "DO NOT SEND ME MORE OFFERS". Nothing else. Crossed out the entire application.
A few weeks later, I get the credit card in the mail.
I asked them for a copy of my application; but all I got was a printout of the database record, which had the same information (name, address) that was there on the original application.
Even without my signature, they accepted the application and sent me the credit card.
There's _got_ to be some law against this.
Clarification -- Re:Your wife made it public (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: application needing signing? (Score:3, Interesting)
A (now defunct) credit card company, NextCard, issued my wife a VISA card via the Internet, based on some spam email she got that basically said "You have a pre-approved card waiting for you, if you just click this link to visit our web site and tell us where to mail it."
She did so (never actually signing anything), and got the card. She proceeded to charge it up, and then ended up getting sick and lost her job. The card went unpaid, and shortly after that, NextCard went belly-up. Some credit ageny must have been appointed to do collections for them anyway though (by the FDIC, I guess?).
Well, the agency conveniently changed the records to show that *I* applied for this credit card myself, and started going after me, personally, for the debt. I argued that this card was never legally signed for in the first place, and challenged them to show me a copy of ANY form they had on file showing what either my signature or my wife's signature looked like. (Someone said they'd mail me a copy of the application form so I could see where it was signed - but of course, nothing ever arrived.)
Well, to make this long story a little shorter - this still stands as a bad mark on my credit history, and every so often, someone calls trying to collect this debt. (It seems this debt is being passed around from one collection agency to another. The last people calling to collect it couldn't even tell me which card it was for. They kept mentioning some other bank I never heard of that I supposedly owed it to. I assume it's some bank that bought out NextCard...)
I refuse to pay this off, on principle, at this point. (Even if I did, I highly doubt they'd ever get things straight, paperwork-wise, to make sure it was taken off my credit report.)
Not good enough... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't even like tossing ATM receipts in the garbage...they come home and get run through the (confetti cut) shredder.
Re:More satisfying solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Hate to break it to you, but a mall is not a public place...it is not "commons". It is private property owned by some corporation and so your "rights" don't apply there! They would likely get the mall security to toss you out (if they didn't charge you with something first). Think about that for a minute...we as a society have exchanged our "commons" and all the activities that were fought for by our forefathers (free speech, assembly etc) for mindless consumption in a corporate-held space where we have few rights at all! Where do people go when they have free time? To the town square to hold assemblies discuss their issues/concerns/greviences with their neighbours? Does such a thing even exist anymore? Where are all your neighbours...at the mall right? Try engaging in one of these "freedoms" in a mall and see how far you get!