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?"

Comments

IAINWAL

[3.5 stripes]

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.

It isn't

[fleppir]

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.

Re:Your wife made it public

[nairb107]

It doesn't matter if it's public knowledge. The credit card marketers submitted her application contract without a legally binding signature.