The courthouse door may have been slammed in your face without ever opening. This is especially true in the realm of your personal information, an ever growing and relevant area referred to as data privacy. This is a vast area, but it affects most people in one of two ways: First, a data breach, which is the theft of your personal information (SSN, bank account information, date of birth, etc., known as personally identifiable information or “PII” ) or protected health information (“PHI”); second, through damaging lies and other untruths about you living online. In either instance, you may have no remedy. It gets worse. You may not even be able to “get your day in court.”
If you have not heard of or read the 2021 Supreme Court case, TransUnion v. Ramirez, you should slog through it. You will be shocked, appalled, or maybe just slightly less than asleep. Perhaps it’s what you’ve come to expect as you now live those dystopian novels you read in high school.
Sadly, you may have already been damaged by the forces this case unleased and not even know it, but, in all likelihood you were not damaged enough for the Supreme Court.
No flesh wounds for this Court.
As the current Supreme Court likes to say, “a bare procedural violation” does not constitute “actual harm” absent a “plausible chance of success.” And what does that even mean? Try nailing that Jell-O to the wall.
It means if you are harmed—perhaps even irrevocably—you have no remedy in a data privacy case. This is true even if some of the justices in the majority don’t know a data breach from a breech birth. Despite this woeful ignorance of technology demonstrated by the Supreme Court, they may have–daresay–aborted your data breach case before it was even conceived.
Lawyers and legal scholars may dispute TransUnion’s more nuanced meaning. All you need to know is the people, the ones who are not corporations, lost. Yes, Virginia, corporations have more rights than real people, and they are vacuuming up all the information about you they can.
