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Can You Sue Over Loss of Personal Information?
GreenCrackBaby asks: "My wife was at a mall about a year ago when she ran across one of those groups who were trying to sign people up for a Visa credit card. Since she didn't yet have a credit card, she decided she'd fill out the form. She had everything filled out and was ready to sign it when she noticed the draconian fine print that essentially promised that they would sell her personal data to anyone they could, so instead of signing the form she said 'no thanks' and tossed it in the garbage. That was a mistake she has been made to regret. Almost immediately SPAM to her university email address went from 0 to 20 a day, and has been slowly increasing since. Soon we started to receive a large number of telemarketing calls to our home (where before we had received almost none). Junk mail addressed to her went through the roof. It wasn't until the Visa card arrived addressed to her that we knew what had happened." It appears that someone fished this woman's application out of the garbage and submitted this anyways, without a signature. How is something like this even close to being legal?
"What has become clear is that someone selling those Visas fished her application out from the garbage and submitted it. We've managed to track down a copy of the form she had filled out, and in the signature area is a big 'N/A'. So now her personal information is being sold to every telemarketer, spammer, and junk mail shop in North America. What can she do? We'd like to sue the company who fished the application from the garbage and make a lesson out of them, but what is there to sue over? Is the loss of personal information even considered a tort?"
As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge. She is lucky that all you are recieving is the spam.
While she was at it, she should have signed a bunch of blank cheques and power of attorney forms and just threw them away.
Why didn't she rip up the application? Or write void on it? Atleast then she could go back and say 'I didn't sign anything, prove it'
I am in no way a lawyer, but isn't forging (or in this case continuing action with a required signature) considered fraud? Sort of like slamming?
If it isn't illegal, which I can't fathom, it certainly should be.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Plain and simple. Regarding her due diligence in protecting her personal information, no action can be taken in regard to disemination of the informatin on the page she 'carelessly' threw in the trash. At least that's what my legal sense tells me (IANAL)
But the submittal of the form for a credit-card is another matter. It indicates someone forged her signature (even if the signature doesn't look anything like your wife's sig) and submitted the form, or someone accepted the form without a signature. Both could lead people in serious trouble with the law.
I am the Barber of Seville.
She didn't sign the form, thus there was no consent, thus there was no contract. So it's not legal.
Unfortunately you may have trouble doing anything about it at this point. Remember back when credit card slips used little pieces of carbon paper? I remember some customers demanding the carbons to carry home with them, or asking me to rip them up before discarding. And that was just a name attached to a number. Your wife probably left her SSN, address, phone number, etc. on that form.
IANAL but your first priority is to get a credit report and see if a card has been issued in your wife's name. Second, get ahold of this company (by the neck) and demand that your wife's name comes out of the files.
That's fraud. It will only turn the focus on her and nobody will want to hear her story anymore.
And don't accept credit card applications from strangers in malls. And if you do, for goodness sake, don't put down an email address that you use for personal mail.
This is good advice, paper shreaders are cheap (at least ones for home usage). Get one that does cross cut if you can for not to much more money.
However some of this advice may not be practical, For example there may be cases where you have to rent a car for some reason. (say you are out of town or need to move and want a van).
You have to consider the "cost" in terms of loss of privacy vs the benifit to you life. I do buy stuff online, but limit where I buy it. You may want to get a mail alias somewhere that you can filter on for email, so when you need to put down an email address put that one down, They have it filtered into a seperate box.
For Postal mail just throw it out.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
"I find this whole tale a bit hard to believe."
Always a doubter, one in every crowd.
"Spammers have no trouble trolling the web for millions of addresses - why would they buy them from a credit card company?"
They don't buy them from THE credit card company they buy them from the information collector. Addresses off of credit card applications are especially useful and valuable to spammers for the following reasons.
1) The are most likely real AND their personal email addresses as opposed to generic spam dump boxes at hotmail or yahoo. Do you trust electronic credit card correspondance to hotmail or your own email provider of choice? Remeber people filling out authoritative forms are more likely to be truthfull.
2) The spammer knows that the applicant has a credit card and the recipients credit history AND likely income bracket. But it gets better because the spammer also knows the applicants gender, age, location, phone number, and marital status etc.
In short these addresses and the information behind them are infinitely more valuable than a generic address fished off a webpage and spammers will pay money for them and them sell them to every other company that will pay for them to recoup their purchase costs.
"And why would anyone include their email address on a credit card application in the first place?"
Many of these companies collect as much information as possible on their forms because said information makes them more money. See above.
"And why would they bother fishing it out of the garbage?"
Reps signing people up get paid by comission the money can vary from $25-200 dollars per application. Would you go into the trash in a public resepticle for say $50? No. Can you be sure that no one else would? Remeber some people make their living off of signups like these although turnover is high.
"And why would they issue a card without her signature?"
The rep likely forged the signature which could be as simple as scribling lines across the signature lines for the money.
"And why would someone so concerned about the loss of her personal information throw the application away right next to the potential thieves?"
Because they were so caught up in the moment of saving their personal information from said potential theives. Also the bin could have been a good 50 feet away but in line of sight.
"And why would someone who gets 1/10 of the spam I get have anything to complain about at all?"
Would you like it if I added another quotient of spam and junkmail to your addresses? Please just post all your financials and address essentials in a reply below and I am certain you will get all your quotient and the grief and MORE. Act now this is a limited time offer.
"Considering the complete lack of non-hearsay evidence, whether it's actionable doesn't matter. You couldn't win anyway."
Fraud is fraud better to try than take it in the teeth without action or complaint.
pngmeep
...isn't even worth what you pay for it. (Yeah, it's free of financial charge. And it's worthless. So one might think it'd be worth exactly what you pay. But you're also probably investing time reading all the responses to your request for info, and as long as the value of your time is higher than zero, that makes this a negative-sum proposition.)
Lots of people have said ask a lawyer. Yeah, do that, if you know any lawyers who aren't already so sick of giving you free legal advice that they got caller ID specifically for the purpose of ensuring that you always go to voice mail. Alternatively, if this is so massively annoying that you're willing to pay for legal advice, do that.
Whether free or paid for, the _best_ news you can expect to get is that even if this is a tort of some kind (IANAL and I'm making no claims one way or the other...merely stating a hypothetical), it will cost more to sue than the aggravation you're enduring could POSSIBLY be worth.
Change phone numbers (consider going with one of the VoIP providers...that's how I got rid of a phone number that used to belong to a fax machine). Get a Mail Boxes Etc box, use that as your primary mailing address, and throw away anything sent to where you actually live. Get your email address changed (or, if you can't, abandon it in favor of a new one). And next time be a bit more careful about throwing away personal data in public wastebaskets while standing a few feet away from people whose own fine-print tells you in no uncertain terms that they have no intention of respecting your privacy.
These are annoying things to have to do, but you don't need a lawyer to tell you they'll be a lot easier and a lot cheaper than filing a lawsuit, even if it turns out that you have credible grounds for one.
Maybe You're New Here, or you weren't paying attention the numerous times this has been gone over, or you've just read too much mainstream news.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Say it again, and pay attention this time.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Copyright infringement is a civil tort. Theft is a criminal offense. They're very, very different. No matter what some asshat from the RIAA or MPAA says.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Your redirect goes to prepaidlegal.com - known spammers.
According to groups.google.com there are 200+ reports of their spam in the sightings newsgroup. The vast majority of spam isn't reported. Having that many reports is pretty convincing evidence. The reason I checked is because I recall having been spammed by them myself.
Despite your saying "I don't want this to be TOO much of a blatant advertisement.. :)" I see that you've posted a grand total of five posts to slashdot, and at least three of those were advertisements for prepaidlegal.com.