In a case that was defended by Brendan Little at Lippes Mathias, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit yesterday became the latest to rule that a plaintiff in a Hunstein lawsuit does not have standing to sue because she did not suffer a concrete injury, although the 13 months it took the Court to issue its ruling did cause some concern that maybe it wasn’t as cut-and-dried as other courts have determined these types of cases to be.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Nabozny v. Optio Solutions can be accessed by clicking here.
Like thousands of other plaintiffs across the country who did so following the ruling in Hunstein v. Preferred Management & Collection Services, the plaintiff in this case alleged that the defendant violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when it shared the plaintiff’s personal information with a third-party company that was hired to print and mail collection letters on the defendant’s behalf. Sharing information with an unauthorized third party was a violation of Section 1692c(b) of the FDCPA, the plaintiff alleged.
A District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds the plaintiff lacked standing, and the plaintiff appealed the ruling to the Seventh Circuit, which heard arguments on the case in September 2022.
The plaintiff argued that disclosing information about her debt to the vendor that printed and mailed the collection letter invaded her privacy and caused her to lose control of her personal financial information.
“We disagree,” the Seventh Circuit wrote, sharing its opinion bluntly, and noting that the Courts of Appeal for the Tenth and Eleventh Circuit have also shared similar opinions and that no other court has ruled differently.
Transmitting information to a “single ministerial intermediary does not remotely resemble the publicity element of the only possibly relevant variant of the privacy tort,” the Appeals Court wrote.
