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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the lost-for-words dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

This seems so wrong on so many counts I am at a loss for [printable] words.

Georgia Supreme Court Rules that State Has No Obligation to Protect Personal Information

Almost exactly one year after the stringent European General Data Protection Regulation came into effect (May 25, 2019), the Supreme Court of the state of Georgia has ruled (May 20,  2019) that the state government does not have an inherent obligation to protect citizens' personal information that it stores.

The ruling relates to a case that dates back to 2013. A Georgia Department of Labor employee inadvertently emailed a spreadsheet containing the names, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and email addresses of 4,457 people who had applied for benefit to about 1,000 people.

Thomas McConnell, whose details appeared on the spreadsheet, filed a putative class action against the Department of Labor, alleging negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, and invasion of privacy. That case has progressed through the legal system to the Supreme Court, and has been dismissed (PDF).

While the Supreme Court has not ruled that there can never be an obligation to protect citizens' data, it has ruled that the obligation is not automatic -- and in the McConnell case, there were no separate requirements to provide the obligation.

McConnell had alleged negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, and invasion of privacy by public disclosure of private facts by the Department of Labor. Each of these claims has been rejected. The first to go was 'negligence' -- dismissed because there is no requirement in law to protect the data of benefit claimants. Furthermore, McConnell's claim that Georgia recognizes a "common law duty 'to all the world not to subject others to an unreasonable risk of harm'" (Bradley Center, Inc. v. Wessner; 1982) does not, according to this ruling, set a precedent.

Furthermore, the existing identity theft statute does not explicitly require anything from data storer, while the statute restricting disclosure of social security numbers only applies to intentional disclosures and not accidental exposures as appeared here. 

The fiduciary duty claim was then dismissed because no public officer stood to gain from the incident, and there was no special relatoinship of confidence between McConnell and the Department.

Finally, the allegation of an invasion of privacy was rejected. The Supreme Court ruled that "the matter disclosed included only the name, social security number, home telephone number, email address, and age of individuals who had sought services or benefits from the Department. This kind of information does not normally affect a person's reputation, which is the interest the tort of public disclosure of embarrassing private facts was meant to remedy."

[...] Venkat Ramasamy, COO of FileCloud, agrees: "Of course, public institutions should care and protect their stakeholders' data (I would say it is a reasonable expectation -- very similar to protecting the rights of personal property, freedom of speech and so on). I think it is high time to have federal privacy law which can be modeled after the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA)."

Related: One Year on, EU's GDPR Sets Global Standard for Data Protection 

Related: State vs. Federal Privacy Laws: The Battle for Consumer Data Protection 

Related: Marco Rubio Proposes New Federal Data Privacy Bill 

Related: With No Unifying U.S. Federal Privacy Law, States Are Implementing Their Own 


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  • (Score: 2) by Revek on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:08PM (5 children)

    by Revek (5022) on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:08PM (#847682)

    They protect them from free publication.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:32PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:32PM (#847687)

    The USA IS the land of the free.

    In NZ we have a specific Privacy Act and it seems to work very well.

    We also have the Official Information Act which stops pollies from hiding their shit from the sunlight. They keep trying to do so, but almost always lose.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Revek on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:50PM (1 child)

      by Revek (5022) on Saturday May 25 2019, @07:50PM (#847690)

      We haven't been the land of the free in a long time. That was replaced with the land of the fee.

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      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @10:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @10:48PM (#847733)

        Unfortunately we had to drop the "r" due to budget cuts. These was no money left over after surveillance and voter suppression efforts got their funding.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:27PM (#848631)

      And all you had to do was trade away your freedoms. You have free speech and media, so long as government doesn't disagree with you. You can have guns if the police think you should be able to, and if they don't think you should then you won't. You seem to have little protection against the whims of politicians riding today's tragedies. And the exemptions in your Official Information Act are even more widely ranging than those in FOIA, including, "9(2)(g)(i) To maintain the effective conduct of public affairs through the free and frank expression of opinions by or between or to Ministers of the Crown or members of an organisation or officers and employees of any department or organisation in the course of their duty; or 9(2)(g)(ii) To maintain the effective conduct of public affairs through the protection of such Ministers, members of organisations, officers, and employees from improper pressure or harassment." So IF it would keep your Lords from communicating or make government inefficient then a request may be refused. In short, you'll never hear about the ones when you lose because your system is rigged to cover them up.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 25 2019, @10:01PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday May 25 2019, @10:01PM (#847726)

    They protect the status-quo. There's a good company there, lots of good people in it, who publish the state laws, and this internet nonsense is gonna put them out of business unless somebody does something about it.

    Similarly, it's just not practical to train the government workers on how to adequately protect personal information, hell, it's hard enough to get them to do their jobs adequately without worrying about protection of personal information. We can't have any namby-pamby Joe Schmo who thinks because the Europeans got some privacy rights about their information that anytime an honest government worker makes an honest mistake and accidentally publishes some personal information that it's an instant payday for them in the courts. Hell, make a law and put an end to this nonsense before it gets started!

    /s Thanks for visiting Georgia. Y'all come back real soon.

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