The IT Nerd

If facing a $350 million class action lawsuit in Ontario isn’t enough, Capital One who was pwned by a hacker recently, which in turn leaked the personal data of 100 million people including 6 million or so in Canada has been slapped with a $600 million lawsuit in Ontario.  Lawyer Vadim Kats is behind this latest suit and you can find the details here.

But that’s not all. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating this. And that’s really bad news for the credit card company as The Privacy Commissioner of Canada can really make companies who are in this situation pay. And what’s interesting is that I haven’t heard of any action from the US Congress. Which is weird as we’re just entering an election cycle over there and this sort of thing is really good for US politicians to get some TV time to help their re-election chances.

What’s clear here is that Canada is taking the lead in terms of holding Capital One accountable for this. Thus I’ll be watching this closely as this is sure to evolve quickly.

The fallout over the epic Capital One data breach has begun. A class action suit has been filed by an Ontario law firm on behalf of six million or so Canadians that were affected. Total price tag: $350 million. CBC News has the details:

Diamond & Diamond’s suit seeks compensation for Canadians who applied for credit cards from Capital One between 2005 and 2019.

“This data breach could have very serious ramifications for those affected with regards to their future finances,” said Jeremy Diamond, managing partner at the firm, in a statement.

The suit’s representative plaintiff is Rina Del Guidice of Bolton, Ont., who obtained a Costco Wholesale MasterCard through Capital One.

It notes that Capital One also operated credit cards offered by other merchants including the Hudson’s Bay Co.

Darryl Singer, the firm’s lead lawyer on the suit, said in a statement that the stolen information could pose a risk to identity theft for years.

“What makes this breach so egregious is that it includes identifying information such as someone’s name and social insurance number that cannot be changed.”

While I hope that Capital One loses this lawsuit and has to pay up, this doesn’t go far enough. Capital One needs to explain how this happened, what they are going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and face punishment in the US, Canada and anywhere else that this data breach reaches. That way they know that their failure to protect their customer data has consequences. And others will know that if they screw up like this, that punishment will be swift and costly.