DestraLegal.ru legal service (Russia's top 100 startups) filed a class action lawsuit against the FoodTech service Yandex.Eda at Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky district court. The lawsuit involves 33 users of the Yandex.Eda service, with another 300 users having sent in applications to join the class action. All who turned to DestraLegal.ru faced the same problem: in the service Yandex.Eda leaked personal data of users, and the database of 50 million records became publicly available. The plaintiffs now demand compensation for moral damages in the amount of 100,000 rubles each.
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What happened?
Yandex.Eda admitted that an employee had caused a massive leak of personal data so that names and phone numbers of the customers, addresses, spending amounts, and codes from the intercoms on the website: https://saverudata.info were published. Whilst Roskomnadzor blocked the site, the database with 50 million records containing the personal data of 23 million Yandex.Eda users was available for some time.
On the day the leak occurred, more than 100 persons approached DestraLegal.ru, who, using an online service, remotely collected the necessary documents so that a class action with 33 was filed to the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow on March 25, 2022.
Why is this important?
Such data leaks are not uncommon, tend to occur in much smaller volumes, and be removed from the internet quickly. Nevertheless, adverse consequences are frequent. For example, participants in the class action against Yandex.Eda received numerous calls from real estate agencies offering to sell or rent out properties at addresses listed in the leaked database, from companies offering cleaning and grooming services, and from banks.
By demanding compensation in a class action, victims avoid further adverse consequences and obtain compensation. can influence how corporations view the security of user data.
In other countries, companies have long borne higher liability for leaks, including through class actions. A telling example is a lawsuit against Insurance Technologies, by which each of the participants obtained compensation of about $7,000. Another striking example is a class action lawsuit against the social network TikTok. The company pledged to pay the class action participants $92 million for violating the rules of collecting and processing of personal data of its users. Leaks of personal data of British Airways employees and clients also served as a reason for the class action. The company was fined $254 mln and reduced to $27 mln due to the difficult financial situation of the company during the pandemic.
