Email data breaches – claim compensation

Email data breaches can result in information being misused and exposed, and victims of such events could be eligible to pursue compensation on a No Win, No Fee basis.

You can contact our team here now for free, no-obligation legal advice about your circumstances to find out quickly if we are able to represent you for a case today.

Risks of email data breaches

Statistics and research have shown that email data breaches are one of the major risks that all organisations face, and that most organisations have had at least one event at some point. In today’s digital age where communication is done mostly electronically, and where we are all working much faster nowadays to be productive, it is easy to see how one incident could cause a significant breach or exposure of information.

And that is all it takes: one small error and the information for potentially thousands or even tens of thousands of people could be affected. It could be a case of employees sending statistical data about huge numbers of customers to a director, but accidentally sending it to the wrong email address. This can easily happen, particularly as many email platforms save the addresses of people we have sent emails to in the past. It could be a case that we receive an email that we think is legitimate but is actually from someone who has broken into an account or has created a copycat account to try to convince someone to hand over information to them.

There are so many ways in which it can happen, and there have been some infamous email data breaches that have taken place in the last few years. One of the most infamous events took place in 2015 and led to our firm pursuing a significant legal action on behalf of people affected. That was the 56 Dean St Clinic Email Leak, where an email was sent to almost 800 users of a HIV clinic service. The sender used the “CC” function rather than the “BCC” function to send the email, which resulted in hundreds of people’s sensitive HIV statuses effectively being leaked to those who were on the email list.

What you can do about a privacy breach

If you have suffered distress or loss as a result of a privacy breach, whether it is a case of you being the victim of email data breaches or other kinds of events, you could be entitled to pursue compensation.

The GDPR can allow anyone who has suffered distress or loss to claim compensation, and most people pursue damages for just the distress. The distress alone, as we will outline below, is well worth claiming for. The GDPR recognises that we can feel worried, angry, upset, and anxious about the fact that our information is no longer in our control.

To succeed with a case, what we need to do is prove that an organisation has been negligent in the duty of care that they had to protect your information. If we can do that, that is when we could secure compensation for you.

The best place to start is to contact our team for free, no-obligation legal advice here now.

Data breach damages are worth claiming

When it comes to our average data breach damages recovery, our average settlement in damages alone is just over £6,000 per claimant. That is for a broad spectrum of cases, from the very minor to the severe, and it is mostly for individual clients. As such, because we can also work on a No Win, No Fee basis for eligible clients, what do you have to lose in pursuing a claim? In reality, you could be entitled to claim thousands of pounds in damages.

Failures in respect of proper cybersecurity planning

Ministry of Justice privacy breach compensation claims