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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 


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Sunday May 26 2019, @08:59PM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Sunday May 26 2019, @08:59PM (#847988)

    If this is legal, someone should leak Trump's tax returns

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
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