Palm and Spring Sued for Losing Personal Information

A Bay Area man filed a class action lawsuit against Palm and Sprint Nextel for losing most all the contacts, appointments and other data stored by many of the hundreds of thousands of Sprint users of the popular Palm webOS line of mobile phones, including the Palm Pre and Pixi. The data loss is reminiscent of the recent data loss suffered by T-Mobile Sidekick users after Microsoft lost the personal data of Sidekick users.

The lawsuit alleges that Palm and Sprint actively marketed the Palm webOS mobile phones as automatically backing up all the data that users would store, such as contacts, appointments, and more and then failed to follow through on these promises.

The suit is brought by Jason Standiford of San Francisco. Standiford alleges he suffered a nearly complete loss of his personal data in November after exchanging his fourth malfunctioning Palm Pre for a fifth new Palm Pre. He further alleges that Palm has since recovered some, though not all of his data, leaving him missing crucial information Palm promised it would safeguard for him.

For its part, Palm has publicly acknowledged the problem, but its statement provided no guidance as to when the problem will be fixed or what Palm or Sprint plan to do for affected customers.

“Following right on the heels of the Sidekick disaster, even more mobile phone users are left in the dark after yet another cloud computing service fails to perform as promised,” explained Michael Aschenbrener, the lead attorney for the class action. “These recent cloud computing catastrophes demonstrate the companies need to do more to protect the data they promise to keep safe. Whether that means doing a better job of backing up the data or allowing customers easier means to back up their data locally, the present ways of doing business in the cloud cannot continue.”

The class action seeks injunctive relief and monetary damages for failing to protect Palm webOS user data and false advertising.

Aschenbrener’s firm, KamberEdelson, LLC, is a class action firm that focuses on internet, technology, and privacy issues. KamberEdelson also represents a woman who filed a class action against Microsoft and T-Mobile for the Sidekick data loss.

Aschenbrener is joined on the lawsuit by Jay Edelson and Ben Richman of KamberEdelson, LLC.

To download the complaint