It was only two days ago that we learned of the first class action lawsuit against Sony in the wake of the PSN outage. Now, two days later, we are learning of a second class action lawsuit filed against Sony. This time, this was filed in a Los Angeles court.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
Did Sony encrypt users credit card credentials? Is there no evidence to suggest that users credit card information is in the wrong hands? Are the reports of stolen money and stolen credit cards for real? Was the encryption strong enough? Sony says that the data was encrypted and that there is no evidence to suggest that the credit cards are in the wrong hands while troubling news has already surfaced that consumers are already losing money and even one unverified source saying that 2.2 million credit card credentials from the data leak is already being sold in shady black markets somewhere online. That aspect of the story has been murky for quite some time now, but a second person has decided that a class action lawsuit against Sony is the course of action.
Just two days ago, the first lawsuit against Sony was filed in a California court accusing Sony of a number of things including being too slow to notify customers of potential data loss, negligence and a whole lot more. While it is unclear how far the lawsuit will go, especially in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling that made class action lawsuits more difficult to file, that isn’t stopping a second class action lawsuit against the company.
Citing the Wall Street Journal, Fox is reporting that an additional lawsuit was filed in a Los Angeles court recently. From the report:
The data breach also prompted the filing of a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles on Wednesday, alleging Sony was negligent in allowing the theft of its members’ personal data.
“Sony broke its contract and violated its customers’ trust,” said Caleb Marker, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the Los Angeles lawsuit, which is also seeking class action status.
All of this is already in the midst of Sony facing tough questions from governments all around the world over its handling of the data breach. The question is, how much damage has this done to the company so far?
A Reuters article on Wednesday says that the stocks plummeted by 5%. There are some who have been trying to pin a number to how much financial damage this will do to the company and Reuters suggests that it could cost the company $1.5 Billion. Has the shares plummeted since then? A quick look at Google Finance would suggest that the stock value has fallen even further, slipping from around the 29 point mark all the way down to 28.31 mark as of this writing. Hard to say if it’s entirely due to the data leak or if it’s a part of a mix of a host of reasons why the stock values went down, but it’s hard to say it had nothing to do with the data leak.
Perhaps another key question is, is consumer trust going to be negatively impacted by this data breach? Certainly, there are no shortage of comments that say that they will avoid Sony products in the future already, but there are others who probably just want the network to be back online so they can keep playing their games on the PSN network. So, ultimately, it will be very interesting to see how many people stay connected to the PSN network after the network is back up and running or if the pool of players will dramatically shrink on that network.
Does this data breach change your perception of Sony?
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
