On January 6th, Justice Morgan certified a class proceeding that was based on a nurse’s unauthorized access to very basic personal health information – patient status and allergy information – so she could obtain prescription drugs.
Although there were no damages to support a negligence claim, Justice Morgan held that the cause of action criterion for certification of a privacy breach claim was met because, “an infringement of privacy can be ‘highly offensive’ without being otherwise harmful in the sense of leading to substantial damages.” (IMHO, this is correct.)
In otherwise assessing the quality the nurse’s infringement, Justice Morgan distinguished Broutzas, in which Justice Perell declined to certify an action, in part, because the theft of address information from patients who had given birth at a hospital was not “highly offensive.” Justice Morgan said:
Counsel for the Plaintiff takes issue with this analysis. In the first place, he points out that the factual context of the Rouge Valley case is distinguishable from the case at bar in one important way: the patients/claimants in [Broutzas] were all in the hospital for the birth of a baby, which is perhaps the least confidential of reasons. Indeed, Perell J. recited the factual background of each patient making a claim in that case, and observed that one had announced their child’s birth and circulated photos of the new baby on social media, while another had done a Facebook posting in celebration of the birth of their new baby at the defendant hospital: Ibid, paras. 97, 106. As Plaintiff’s counsel here points out, the expectation of privacy in such circumstances is negligible.
Fair enough, but it’s nonetheless quite clear that not all judges value privacy the same way. The uncertainty in judge-made privacy law is palpable.
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