Just days after a class action lawsuit was filed in Toronto over the LifeLabs data breach, a second class action lawsuit was filed in BC.
The news is continuing to get worse for medical diagnostics company, LifeLabs. Late last year, the company suffered from a data breach. In all, 15 million had their information compromised. The news was then quickly followed up by a class action lawsuit filed in Toronto.
Now, it seems that more bad news is coming LifeLabs way. A second class action lawsuit was filed in BC. The lawsuit was filed on Anna Belle Tharani’s behalf in the BC Supreme Court. From CTV:
Tharani’s lawsuit argues that LifeLabs lacked “adequate security” and “adequate training for employees” ahead of the attack, and that the company should have notified customers sooner after it happened.
LifeLabs notified B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner about the breach on Nov. 1, but the public was not made aware until mid-December.
That delay potentially exposed customers to “additional, unnecessary risks of harm,” according to the claim.
LifeLabs has not filed a statement of defence in the case, and has not responded to a request for comment from CTV News. None of the claims in Tharani’s lawsuit have been proven.
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix previously said the company requested some time before making the breach public because it wanted to first ensure its systems were secure and not vulnerable to secondary attacks.
“There was a delay to ensure that information that hadn’t been compromised wouldn’t be compromised and information that could be protected was protected,” Dix told reporters earlier this month.
With multiple class action lawsuits filed, it’ll be interesting to see how the courts decide to proceed. Do they pick one lawsuit and say it represents all of Canada or do they accept both and say the BC one represents just BC residents while the Toronto lawsuit represents all of Ontario? Will they simply reject both instead (which would be rather surprising in the grand scheme of things)? In any event, the matters are going to be decided by the courts at this stage. What will also be interesting to see is if more class action lawsuits will be proposed in other provinces as well. So far, we haven’t seen that yet, but you never know.
Either way, this is not a good way for the company to ring in a new year.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
