In October 2012, Barnes & Noble notified the public it had discovered that hackers were stealing credit and debit card information from its PIN pad devices at 63 stores throughout the United States. The data was obtained by tampering with the PIN pad devices used to process transactions. Barnes & Noble did not directly notify individual customers, but rather just gave public notices through several media
On September 3, 2013, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed a class action complaint against Barnes & Noble in which damages were sought, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the claims. The Court found that actual injury is required to establish standing.
This line of reasoning is good news for retailers and others who are faced with class actions based on speculative injury and loss. It is to be expected that Canadian Courts may start to look at these data loss cases in a similar way.
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