personal information
personal information

Alberta decision will help lawyers navigate SCC privacy ruling, lawyer says

An Alberta court has sided with a person seeking to shelter their identity as part of a suit against the federal government, a matter the judge says brings into “sharp relief” the tension between the public’s right to open courts and an individual’s right to privacy.

The plaintiff, who is identified only as AB, has launched a claim against Veterans Affairs Canada, the Royal Canadian Legion and employees of both organizations, claiming breach of fiduciary duty, breach of privacy and waiver of tort. AB says their personal information was accessed and disclosed without consent during their attempts to financial support and medical treatment for alleged injuries suffered during their time with the Canadian Armed Forces.

And Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Craig Jones has approved AB’s requests for anonymization and sealing orders in the case, as well as a publication ban on all details that could lead to identification of AB by name. The court looked at the test outlined by the Supreme Court (in Sherman Estate v. Donovan 2021 SCC 25) for such orders — that court openness poses a serious risk to an important public interest; that the order sought is necessary to prevent that serious risk because reasonable alternative measures are not available; and the benefits of the order outweigh the negative effects on a proportional basis.

Justice Jones wrote there is a serious risk to AB’s dignity because the issues in the pleadings include stigmatized medical conditions and that disclosure of that information to even one person would compromise AB’s ability to control how they are perceived by others.

“And their right to effect that control is of superordinate importance,” he wrote. “Further, I find that their concerns are objectively reasonable because they engage intimate details of their experiences and about them as a

Read the rest

Attorney General James Secures $400,000 From Wegmans After Data Breach Exposed Consumers’ Personal Information

AG James Requires Wegmans to Improve Data Storage Security Practices to Protect Consumers

(June 30, 2022) New York – New York Attorney General Letitia James today secured $400,000 from grocery store chain, Wegmans, for exposing the personal information of more than three million consumers nationwide, including more than 830,000 New Yorkers. For years, Wegmans kept consumers’ personal information in misconfigured cloud storage containers that were open, making it easy for hackers or others to potentially access the information. The compromised data included usernames and passwords for Wegmans accounts, as well as customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and additional data derived from drivers’ license numbers. As a result of Attorney General James’ action, Wegmans is also required to upgrade its data security practices to protect consumers.

NYS Attorney General Latitia James

“Wegmans failed to safely store and seal its consumers’ personal information, instead it left sensitive information out in the open for years,” said Attorney General James.Today, Wegmans is paying the price for recklessly handling and exposing millions of consumers’ personal information on the internet. In the 21st century, there’s no excuse for companies to have poor cybersecurity systems and practices that hurt consumers.”

In April 2021, a security researcher informed Wegmans that a cloud storage container hosted on Microsoft Azure was left unsecured and open to public access, potentially exposing consumers’ sensitive information. Wegmans immediately reviewed its cloud environment and identified the container, which had a database backup file with over three million records of customer email addresses and account passwords. The container was misconfigured from its creation in January 2018 until April 2021. During this time, an unauthorized actor could have accessed and cracked account credentials, using them to log in to a customer’s Wegmans account or to access a customer’s account on

Read the rest