I won’t address the legal aspects but the following from Alice’s link is a bit… well, I don’t have a word for it.
And she’s blaming it on Rogers. That’s not an “I’m sorry”. That’s an “I’m sorry I got * caught*”
I’m curious. Can the husband name the reward from this lawsuit as part of the divorce settlement? Be kinda cool if she wins the suit, and has to pay the whole sum over to the man she was cheating on.
They shouldn’t have done what they did . . . but then again, if her husband had murdered her, would that be the phone company’s fault? No, and neither is her divorce. The divorce is a consequence of the affair, and not of her husband receiving her mail. I can’t see how the phone company could be liable for her ‘losing her life’.
Dunno. Would depend on how Ontario’s Family Property Act defines the period for property acquired during the marriage, I would suppose. But if any money from the lawsuit is considered family property, the usual rule is equal division between the spouses. Maybe Muffin will come along to elaborate.
It sounds like Rogers really screwed up. It gave her password to the jilted lover.
That said, I would think that her claim would fail on the damages aspect. The companies screw up isn’t the proximate cause of her damages, i.e. the failure of her marriage and the loss of employment.
Granted I know nothing about Canadian privacy law, but just going by common law principles –
I was under the impression that a privacy claim comes with its own damages, that is, the invasion of privacy itself is the relevant harm.
Under the common law, there were actions in privacy for –
- Commercial misappropriation of identity,
- Intrusion into a private space,
- Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts, and
- Publication of offensive (but not necessarily defamatory) information (“false light”)
Under these claims, I believe, the harm would be the disclosure and that in itself would justify damages.
And if we go with an embarrassing private facts-type claim, you do have a cognizable argument that it was the disclosure of the private information that led to all the downstream harms. Because without such disclosure, the fact of the existence of the affair would have remained the same, but the consequences would not have occurred.
Again, I know nothing about Canadian law, so this is all just waggery.
“After she terminated her relationship with the “third party” in August 2007, the jilted lover, himself a married father of three, called Rogers and obtained her secret password to her voicemail and used it to access it to harass her and taunt the husband, the statement of claim alleges.”
My response to that - BUH?!? That is NOT supposed to happen. Hell, we’re still getting paper bills for all our utilities because I can’t make the changes to email billing, and Joe Schmoe can get her secret password? I see Ontario doesn’t have privacy laws (which I question - surely they have SOME privacy laws?), but cancelling her cellphone and putting it on her husband’s bill would piss me off, too - I might have very good reasons (other than fooling around) for having my cellphone in a particular name and getting separate billing.
Yes it is.
Adultery is illegal in many jurisdictions, including here in Minnesota:
(Note the sexism enshrined in our laws: only a wife is guilty of adultery; a husband having an affair is not adultery (unless the woman is another man’s wife).)
I’m getting married. I’ve had my own cellphone account from back before we even knew each other. It took several steps to consolidate our accounts, so we could take advantage of savings through bundled services. Even though BOTH of our names were on the land line, she was the primary account holder and I could not do anything without her input (we also wanted all the bills under my name).
First step, my wife-to-be had to call the phone company to initiate a transfer, then I had to call and accept the transfer, and then we had to sort out a slew of other various issues.
No way in hell could I just call up and say “Can I just combine these?” without her permission. They flat out told me, no way, nope, wouldn’t matter if we were married even.
ETA: The above was through Bell. Rogers is notorious for frakking up billing every which way and I refue to do business with them for anything. Really they couldn’t pay me to use them.
From the news account, it appears that Rogers did not follow normal procedures in this case. The telco does not claim to have obtained permission from Nagy to change the billing for her account. Part of their claim is that bundling the billing somehow reduces the cost of the cell phone, but there is no elaboration on why this would be. The husband does not appear to have included Nagy’s cell phone in the bundled service. From the story it appears they later gave out her password to her former lover, and then there was a recurrence of the cell phone billing issue. Is that three breaches of privacy on the same account?
Unless there are facts outstanding that show this in another light, I think Rogers has clear liability. What anyone thinks about Nagy’s behavior is not relevant.
This seems to be a huge part of Rogers’s problem. It doesn’t appear that the husband actually requested to consolidate their respective bills. He only added internet and land line to his/their existing account, but Roger’s then took it upon themselves to just consolidate everything.
They shouldn’t have consolidated bills without permission, especially if the other bill had a different name attached to it. It would be like arbitrarily deciding to combine our bills with our tenants’!
Plus, some people may want separate bills for services anyway. My buddy’s phone is paid for by his company. It’s his own BlackBerry, but he submits copies of his bills to his company and they cover all the work-related calls. He’d be pissed if the service provider one day just consolidated his whole family’s phone records into one.
From the article posted by alice in post#20:
I’m guessing Roger’s lawyers are tearing their hair out.
Adultery is not illegal in Canada, which is the relevant jurisdiction.
I don’t see how the woman’s affair enters into it. If the situation were all the same except that she was calling a women’s shelter rather than her boyfriend, it would be unquestionable that Rogers was in the wrong. It’s actually kind of sad that some sort of “fallen woman” aura can cast that into doubt.
We should keep in mind that these are allegations made by the plaintiff in a Statement of Claim, and we shouldn’t necessarily accept them as gospel truth. Having dealt with Rogers before, I have no difficulty believing that they are guilty of the billing screw up. However, I find it hard to believe they would give out her voicemail password. I think it’s more likely that the lover knew or guessed her password.
Yeah, at that point the corporate lawyer calls and asks, “So, did you have an amount in mind?”
Or he knew her well enough to guess the answers to her “security questions”.
It’s also an issue of damages.
Certainly, if the facts as alleged are true, Rogers screwed up; but what damages are flowing from that screw-up? Is Rogers “to blame” for the damage caused to this woman’s relationship - or did she also contribute, by having the affair in the first place?
If the screw-up (say) revealed personal info to a fraudster, who proceded to use it for identity theft - and was themselves judgment-proof - I could see Rogers being on the hook for 100% of the damages.
But in this case, it seems that the majority of the “damage” would be attributed to the actions of the Plaintiff. It is that, rather than “fallen woman” aura, that makes the case interesting - I don’t think it would be any different if it was a man making the allegations.
It’s a bit different then putting one gender over another, as a single woman is free to do as she wants under this law. Also the man is guilty of adultery.
It’s a weird dichotomy, but not ‘conventional’ sexism.
A married man who has an affair with a single woman is NOT guilty of adultery under this law. A married woman who has an affair with a single man IS guilty of adultery.
Unequal treatment of people because of their gender is the essence of sexism, to my mind. That’s what this law does.
(Older versions of this law made it even more clear: adultery was a crime against the husband, because it damaged the property value of his wife.)
Hmm… Sounds like a “thin-skull rule” vs. “crumbling skull rule” type of thing.
Say I slap you in the face very, very gently, not knowing that you have a unique medical condition. Your entire jaw flies off your face! By the thin-skull rule, even though the damage was completely unforeseeable to me, my actions knocked the bottom of your face off and I’m liable. One could argue that Rogers screwed up, and though they couldn’t foresee the magnitude of the consequences, they are responsible.
Crumbling-skull takes the position that your jaw is already falling off your face and its completely inevitable that you will be jawless soon. I may have accelerated your Pez-dispenser look, but ultimately, there is no doubt at all that it would have happened anyway. Rogers made the break-up happen suddenly when the wife didn’t expect it, but one could argue that her actions could not be undone and divorce was inevitable.
Given the cost of litigation, the severity of the breach of privacy, and more significantly breach of contract (I can guarantee they have a published privacy policy even if Ontario doesn’t have the kind of privacy laws they do in BC), Rogers should just settle out of court and see if she’d take a lesser sum than what she’s demanding.