Pissed off Canadian Tells Sony ‘Game On’ with PlayStation Class Action

May 5th, 2011. By Hunter West

Natasha Maksimovic is mad as hell and she deserves to be. 

Natasha is the 21-year-old resident of Mississauga, a city in the Greater Toronto corridor in Canada, serving as the lead plaintiff of a proposed class action lawsuit against Sony over the potential theft of personal information. 

There are some 77 million people worldwide who may agree with her. 

At issue is personal information belonging to gamers and users of Sony PlayStation and Oriocity systems. Such information includes, but may not be limited to names, street addresses, birthdates, passwords, security answers, logins, billing information, and so on. 

Sony has reportedly apologized for the breach and offered a 30, or 60-day free membership for users on its PlayStation network. 

Maksimovic says that’s not good enough. “If you can’t trust a huge multi-national corporation like Sony to protect your private information, who can you trust?” she asks. 

Exactly. 

It appears that Sony has done two things wrong. First, the electronics juggernaut appears to have dropped the ball in protecting its system sufficiently from hackers who constantly cruise the Internet looking for portals to plunder. Second, they appear to have taken the potential theft of 77 million sets of personal information worldwide—about a million in Canada—somewhat lightly. 

The lawsuit alleges that Sony was aware of the breach, but failed to advise clients in a timely fashion. When you factor in the reality that Sony, according to reports, is not able to verify whether credit card or debit card information was also taken, a serious deficit in security seems apparent. 

It wasn’t that long ago that while North Americans embraced the Internet for everything from research, to communication and entertainment—they stopped short of shopping online. Retailers attempting to sell merchandise online were having a hard time convincing potential customers to submit credit, or debit card information. Fearful of where it went. Who would see it. Deathly afraid that it might be abused. 

But times have changed. 

Now, scores of people do their banking online and think nothing of submitting information in an effort to make a purchase, register for a service, or for any number of consumer transactions that flood the Internet in 2011. iTunes. Gaming. The list goes on—and all involve the need to share personal and sometimes highly confidential information needed to facilitate our virtual world. 

We’re still careful, but almost to the point of complacency. It’s no big deal anymore, to buy something online. You just assume, as a consumer, that the web host or retailer has the proper security checks and balances in place. 

Well, apparently not. 

If we’re getting complacent about this stuff, so too perhaps are the web hosts. Sure, you may have your site reflecting the latest security protocols and protections when it was set up. But that was six months, or a year ago. Five years, perhaps. A lot can happen in five weeks, let alone five years. Hackers are always coming up with new ways to defeat firewalls, crack codes, get inside the virtual compound and steal secrets. 

Web site security is a constantly evolving process. It has to be. Because the hackers are constantly evolving, too. 

Natasha has a right to be angry. “It appears to me,” she says, “that Sony focuses more on protecting its games than its PlayStation users.” 

A Toronto law firm has commenced the proposed class action lawsuit against Sony Japan, Sony USA, Sony Canada and various other Sony entities for breach of privacy. Plaintiffs are seeking in excess of $1 billion in damages, including the requirement by Sony to pay the costs of credit monitoring services and fraud insurance coverage for those affected, for a period of two years. 

Tags: hackers, internet security, Natasha Maksimovic, Oriocity, Play Station, Privacy, Sony, Sony Class Action, Sony PlayStation

This was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 10:27 am and is filed under Class Action, Internet/E-commerce . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.