Spokeo v. Robins, No. 13-1339, 578 U.S.___, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016)
In a highly anticipated Article III standing decision concerning online data privacy, the Supreme Court attempted to clarify the minimum threshold required for a plaintiff's claims to survive the subject matter jurisdiction qualifications found in Article III of the Constitution. At issue was whether search engine Spokeo's alleged posting of incorrect information about plaintiff on its "people search" site constituted a cognizable harm. The court vacated and remanded the Ninth Circuit's ruling that plaintiff had standing to bring a class action against Spokeo because it allegedly violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by posting false information about his employment, marital status and education background. In a 6-2 decision written by Justice Alito, the Court held that because the Ninth Circuit failed to consider the "concreteness" aspect of the injury-in-fact requirement, its Article III standing analysis was incomplete. To establish Article III standing, a plaintiff must demonstrate a concrete harm. In the Court's view, a bare violation of the FCRA, which provides for statutory damages, does not necessarily confer standing, because some unlawful inaccuracies in a consumer's information — dissemination of an inaccurate ZIP code, for instance — could not "without more, ... work any concrete harm." The Court remanded to the Ninth Circuit to address "whether the particular procedural violations alleged in this case entail a degree of risk sufficient to meet the concreteness requirement" of Article III. View the decision. (Read our discussion of recent decisions applying Spokeo in Consumer Privacy and Data Security.)
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