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Federal Court’s Embrace Of FTC Data-Breach Settlements As ‘Common Law’ Treads On Due Process

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Dissent

Cory L. Andrews of Washington Legal Foundation has an OpEd that begins:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has developed a well-known penchant for using individually negotiated settlement agreements and consent decrees to announce for the first time what qualifies as “unfair” or “deceptive” conduct under the FTC Act. In the data-privacy arena, FTC views these enforcement actions (and the resulting consent decrees) as a source of “common law” that places the business community on sufficient notice of what data-security practices § 5 of the FTC Act requires.

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington recently ratified that view in a controversial ruling, Veridian Credit Union v. Eddie Bauer. The case arose following a 2016 cyberattack on Eddie Bauer’s network that compromised customers’ payment-card data. Veridian Credit Union, whose cardholders had their data stolen after shopping at Eddie Bauer, brought suit under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act (CPA), which like § 5 of the FTC Act also allows courts to award treble damages to private plaintiffs who are injured by “unfair” or “deceptive” acts. Veridian alleged that Eddie Bauer’s failure to adopt data-security measures that FTC has required in other cases constitutes an “unfair” practice under the Washington CPA.

Read more on Forbes.

The concerns raised in this piece will sound familiar to those who have followed the LabMD case and/or the academic scholarship of Dan Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, who have written extensively about the consent decrees as a source of “common law.”

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