How much can you claim in compensation for a GDPR breach?

Many people want to know how much they could be entitled to receive in compensation for a GDPR breach. Here’s an insight for you based on our extensive experience.

As a leading firm of data breach lawyers, we’ve been helping thousands of people for data protection and privacy issues since 2014. We launched our first major action in 2015 for the 56 Dean Street Clinic leak, and our team is now involved in dozens of different actions as well as a wealth of individual cases.

What this means is that we have extensive experience in this complex and niche area of law. In fact, we’ve been specifically representing data breach victims for a lot longer than most other law firms. Having settled a wide range of cases for several years, here’s how we approach valuing a GDPR compensation case.

How we value compensation for a GDPR breach

When it comes to how we value claims for compensation for a GDPR breach, there are a few key factors that can be considered.

Generally speaking, we look at two key parts:

• General Damages, which covers the severity of any distress caused by the loss of control of personal information;
• Special Damages, which is for any losses and expenses incurred, which could include things like money stolen from fraud events.

The Special Damages part is all about amounts based on actual losses and expenses. When it comes to the distress claim, this is subjective. It’s often based on things like the nature of the data exposed or misused, how far information has been exposed, and how this has affected someone personally.

People can be affected by a breach in different ways, so we take into account the individual impact.

In terms of the nature and the extent of a breach, we can consider factors such as:

• Medical data breach claims sometimes being high value given that this is the kind of information we do not want others to know;
• The risk of financial information, like payment card data, being used by criminals to try and commit fraud or identity theft;
• How much of your data has been exposed or misused, and to who. The distress could be worse if it’s a large amount of data that has been accessible online, for example.

These are the kinds of things that we consider when we look at data breach compensation amounts. We also use our own extensive experience in settling many cases over the last five years for precedents as well. This includes some of the most serious breaches that have ever taken place, like the 56 Dean Street Clinic email leak of 2015 where people’s HIV status was leaked. In those cases, the impact was substantial!

Virgin Media data breach compensation action

As a leading consumer rights and data breach law firm, we’re involved in over 35 separate data actions. We were recently in the media talking about the potential pay-outs in compensation for a GDPR breach that affected Virgin Media, where we have estimated amounts.

Although it’s early days, and a lot can happen between now and a settlement, we estimate that the overall pay-out for the 900,000 victims could reach £4.5bn. This is based on damages assessed at £5,000.00 per claimant.

We’ve already launched our Virgin Media data breach compensation action and seen a surge in new sign-ups following our media outreach. To find out more about the action, please see our dedicated website here.

British Airways data breach compensation action

We were also in the media last year talking about the estimated compensation for a GDPR breach that hit British Airways in 2018.

For the 500,000 or so victims of those breaches, we estimated potential pay-outs could be in the £6,000.00 mark, with anyone suffering a severe psychological injury perhaps even being able to claim up to £16,000.00.

This is the first GDPR Group Litigation Order (GLO) action in England and Wales, and we’re on the Steering Committee for it. You can read more about the action on the dedicated website here.

This can give you an idea of the kinds of figures that we could go for, but it’s important to understand that amounts are based on individual claim factors and the individual impact for the victim. We will always fight for the highest possible pay-out for you, no matter how big or small the case might be. We also offer No Win, No Fee representation, and you can speak to our team today for free, no-obligation advice.

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