Federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) cases
The eighth circuit court
of appeals held that certain individuals may properly sue various Minnesota law
enforcement agencies for unlawfully accessing the individuals’ personal data
through the Driver and Vehicle Services database maintained by the Department
of Public Safety (DPS) under the federal Driver’s
Privacy Protection Act.
The court upheld the lower
courts’ determinations that the statute of limitations on DPPA claims begins to
run at the time that the violation occurred (as opposed to when the violation
is discovered). This affirmed the dismissal of claims brought after the applicable
four-year limitation period.
To analyze whether the allegations
presented sufficient facts to support a DPPA claim, the court looked at several
factors, including the total number of accesses, each individual’s criminal
history, the nature of each individual’s personal relationship with law
enforcement agencies, and the whether the accesses exhibited suspicious
patterns in sustaining timely claims.
Finally, the court affirmed the dismissal of all claims
against current and former Commissioners of DPS, reasoning that they had neither
negligently or knowingly violated the DPPA.
McDonough
v. Anoka County et al., No. 14-1754 et seq., (8th Cir., Aug. 20, 2015).
Data in bus video recordings
The Minnesota court of appeals affirmed that Metro
Transit bus video recordings maintained by the Met Council that had been used
in an internal personnel investigation were public data. The court ruled that
the recordings were not properly classified as personnel data because
the data were initially collected for a variety of purposes, and not solely for
the purpose of monitoring or investigating Metro Transit employees. The court
stated “Data that are not initially classified as ‘personnel data’ are not
automatically converted to private data merely because they are used for
personnel purposes.”
KSTP-TV v. Metro Transit and
the Metropolitan Council, No. A14-1957 (Minn. Ct. App., Aug. 24, 2015).
The court of appeals cited
the holding in KSTP-TV v. Metro Transit (above),
to affirm that a video recording - created for a variety of purposes by a
government entity - cannot be properly classified as private, personnel data and the
data on the recording are public.
Burks v. Metropolitan Council, No. 27-CV-14-3175 (Minn. Ct. App.,
Sept. 8, 2015, unpublished).
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