A sign outside the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale. Photo by Sebastian Bergmann via Wikimedia Commons
A Los Angeles man who has held a Yahoo! user account for more than a decade filed a lawsuit against the company stemming from the technology firm’s acknowledgment of a widespread data breach.
Brendan Quinn’s Los Angeles Superior Court proposed class-action lawsuit alleges negligence, breach of contract and violations of the state’s Civil Code and Business and Professions Code.
Quinn is seeking unspecified damages as well as an injunction directing Yahoo to immediately encrypt all confidential user information and to immediately notify users whose personal information is compromised and to provide them with identity-theft monitoring.
Yahoo communications manager Megan Levinson told City News Service, “Yahoo doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.”
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo announced on Friday that a recent internal investigation showed that sensitive information involving 500 million user accounts was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what the company believes was a “state-sponsored actor.”
“Reports indicate this is the largest data breach in history,” the suit states.
According to the 24-page lawsuit, Quinn provided his name, phone number and date of birth when he registered for his Yahoo account. He says he uses the account for a “variety of general purposes and reasonably expected that … Yahoo would maintain the privacy of his confidential account information.”
Given the size of the Yahoo security problem, Quinn’s account “was almost certainly amongst those included in the data breach,” according to the suit.
—City News Service
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