Personal Injury Resources

Legal perspective from Wired on the ChoicePoint case.

[F]or the individuals whose identities were actually stolen, there is likely to be no recourse for their ruined credit histories and the countless hours it will take them to restore their good names.

Attorney Charles Merrill pointed to a case in South Carolina as an example of what could happen to victims who try to sue ChoicePoint for not screening buyers of their data carefully.

In that case, a victim of identity theft tried to sue Citibank and two credit card companies for damages suffered after an unknown perpetrator stole his identity and opened accounts with Citibank, Capital One and Premier Bankcard in his name. The district court threw the case out, saying that the consumer had no valid claim against the financial companies because he wasn't their customer. Two other cases in different states have had the same outcome.

Consumers could find themselves in the same dilemma with ChoicePoint, since they are not customers of ChoicePoint.

But Andrea Matwyshyn, an assistant professor of law at Northwestern University who specializes in technology regulation and information security best practices, said that judges could determine that ChoicePoint did have a relationship with the public, albeit an indirect one, and assumed a certain level of responsibility for individuals' data when it decided to collect and sell private information.

"Different judges make different decisions," she said. "There's a lot of room for maneuvering here, and the case law involving identity theft is going to develop in a very uneven, messy fashion for a while until it settles out."