Jane Wester reports:
U.S. District Judge Nelson Román of the Southern District of New York on Monday dismissed a proposed class action lawsuit against Ally Financial, finding that the plaintiff failed to establish the injury suffered by a data breach incident.
Named plaintiff David De Medicis sued the bank in 2021, arguing that the security of his account and the proposed class members’ accounts at Ally were compromised by a data breach in which a code error revealed Ally customers’ names and passwords to third parties involved in business relationships with the bank.
Ally, through its attorneys at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, moved to dismiss the original complaint, emphasizing that Ally “immediately began fraud-monitoring efforts to assess threats or risks of fraud … including monitoring the accounts of potentially-affected customers for fraudulent, suspicious, or anomalous activity.”
Read more at Law.com.
This dismissal may offer hope to other defendants if they can show they took immediate steps to monitor for fraud or misuse and that they took steps to protect people, and there has never been any evidence of any misuse of any of the data at all.