Corporate Litigation: Standing to Bring Consumer Data Breach Claims
Security experts say that there are two types of companies in the United States: “those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked.” More and more companies have been experiencing data breaches, and “the absolute size of the breaches is increasing exponentially.” Predictably, consumers who believe their personal and/or financial information was compromised by a data breach have been suing the breached companies. But there is a threshold question with which courts have been grappling in recent data breach cases: Have the consumer plaintiffs suffered an actual harm sufficient to establish standing to sue in federal court under Article III of the Constitution?