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UC San Diego Health Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit Overview:
- Who: A cancer patient started a class action lawsuit against UC San Diego Health.
- Why: The plaintiff claims UC San Diego Health did not do enough to prevent a December 2020 data breach which exposed patients’ personal and private information.
- Where: The class action lawsuit was filed in California federal court.
UC San Diego Health failed to protect patients’ personal and private information by allowing hackers to infiltrate its employees’ email accounts last year, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
Plaintiff Denise Menezes claims UC San Diego Health did not have reasonable security procedures in place that could have prevented the breach, which exposed patients personal information including names, addresses, dates of birth, medical records, social security numbers, and more.
Menezes wants to represent a nationwide and California Class of patients whose personal and private information was compromised by the data breach that occurred between Dec. 2, 2020 and April 8, 2021.
UC San Diego Fails to Protect Cancer Patient’s Private Info From Data Breach
Menezes says she was required to provide UC San Diego Health with sensitive private information in order to receive breast cancer treatment from Moores Cancer Center.
Plaintiff claims she received a notice from UC San Diego Health in September informing her she was a victim of a data breach that began in December 2020.
In its notice, UC San Diego Health misrepresented to Menezes that it had previously disclosed the data breach, since patients would have had to check the health system’s website in order to find out about it, something they would not regularly do, according to the class action lawsuit.
Further, UC San Diego Health waited months to contact patients individually and confused them by being vague about who orchestrated the breach, and by telling them their information was not the target of the attack and that there was no evidence it had been misused, says Menezes.
“The objective of almost every data breach is to gain access to an organization’s sensitive data so that the data can be misused for financial gain,” states the class action lawsuit. “By waiting months to disclose the Data Breach and by downplaying the risk of misuse, UC San Diego Health prevented victims from taking meaningful, proactive, and targeted mitigation measures that could help protect them from harm.”
UC San Diego Health informed patients it was enhancing its security procedures to ensure another data breach wouldn’t occur, according to the class action lawsuit, however, Menezes claims the enhancements were basic measures that should have already been in place to begin with.
Menezes claims UC San Diego Health violated the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, and Unfair Competition Law.
The plaintiff is demanding a jury trial and seeking relief in the form of compensatory, consequential, general, statutory, nominal, and trebled and/or punitive or exemplary damages for herself and all Class Members.
A similar class action lawsuit was filed this month by a patient of St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System in Georgia who claims the healthcare network failed to protect its patients personal and private information from a data breach.
Are you a patient of UC San Diego Health who had their personal and private information exposed during a data breach last year? Let us know in the comments!
The plaintiff is represented by Jason S. Hartley of Hartley LLP and Norman E. Siegel and J. Austin Moore of Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP. The UC San Diego Health Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit is Menezes v. The Regents of the University of California, Case No. 3:21-cv-01641, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
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5 thoughts onUC San Diego Health Failed To Protect Patients’ Private Information From Hackers, Says Class Action
I’m a UCSD patient, too. Please send me a link to add me to this class action, if possible.
Add me
I just received the letter from UCSD staying that my medical information was among those vulnerable to the breach or maybe affected by the breach. The letter was vague and did not disclose any further details of this extreme violation of my private information.
It is on the news today that the Chinese paid for all the information. They have been collecting every Americans data and DNA information
You didn’t take the vaccines did you ?