Opinion ID: 4246971
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: spokeo and decisions of our sister circuits

Text: At its core, standing is “an essential and unchanging part of the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992). Our analysis of this threshold issue begins with Spokeo. 136 S. Ct. 1540. To have standing, Bassett must allege that he “(1) suffered an injury in fact, (2) that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of [ABM], and (3) that is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.” Id. at 1547. An injury in fact is “‘an invasion of a legally protected interest’ that is ‘concrete and particularized’ and ‘actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.’” Id. at 1548 (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560). This appeal turns on whether Bassett alleged a concrete injury in fact. Spokeo, like this case, involved a putative consumer class action alleging willful violations of the FCRA. Robins claimed that Spokeo, a consumer reporting agency, published inaccurate credit report information about him, in violation of the FCRA. Id. at 1545–46. The district court dismissed the complaint for lack of standing, but we reversed. Id. at 1546. Because Robins alleged that “Spokeo BASSETT V. ABM PARKING SERVICES 7 violated his statutory rights, not just the statutory rights of other people,” and Robins’s “personal interests in the handling of his credit information are individualized rather than collective,” we concluded that Robins’s “alleged violations of [his] statutory rights [were] sufficient to satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement of Article III.” Id. (quoting 742 F.3d 409, 413–14 (9th Cir. 2014)). Finding this analysis “incomplete,” the Supreme Court vacated and remanded to consider whether Robins alleged a concrete injury in fact. Id. at 1545. The Court emphasized that “Article III standing requires a concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation.” Id. at 1549. A plaintiff must show that a concrete injury “actually exist[s]”; in other words, it is “real, and not abstract.” Id. at 1548 (internal quotation marks omitted). Intangible harms and a “risk of real harm” can be sufficiently concrete. Id. at 1549–50. But “a bare procedural violation, divorced from any concrete harm,” cannot “satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement of Article III.” Id. at 1549. Importantly, the Court noted that “[a] violation of one of the FCRA’s procedural requirements may result in no harm”— for example, “[i]t is difficult to imagine how the dissemination of an incorrect zip code, without more, could work any concrete harm.” Id. at 1550. The Court remanded to determine “whether the particular procedural violations alleged . . . entail a degree of risk sufficient to meet the concreteness requirement.” Id. Following Spokeo, two of our sister circuits dismissed for lack of standing identical consumer class actions to the one presented in this appeal—alleged violations of the FCRA’s credit card expiration date redaction requirement. In Meyers v. Nicolet Restaurant of De Pere, the Seventh Circuit held that “Spokeo compels the conclusion that Meyers’[s] 8 BASSETT V. ABM PARKING SERVICES allegations are insufficient to satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement for Article III standing”: The allegations demonstrate that Meyers did not suffer any harm because of Nicolet’s printing of the expiration date on his receipt. Nor has the violation created any appreciable risk of harm. After all, Meyers discovered the violation immediately and nobody else ever saw the non-compliant receipt. In these circumstances, it is hard to imagine how the expiration date’s presence could have increased the risk that Meyers’[s] identity would be compromised. 843 F.3d at 727. The court also observed that in the Clarification Act, Congress was “quite concerned” about abusive FCRA lawsuits where a consumer does not suffer actual harm, and “specifically declared that failure to truncate a card’s expiration date, without more, does not heighten the risk of identity theft.” Id. at 727–28. Hence, “without a showing of injury apart from the statutory violation, the failure to truncate a credit card’s expiration date is insufficient to confer Article III standing.” Id. at 728– 29. The Second Circuit reached the same conclusion in Crupar-Weinmann v. Paris Baguette America, Inc. In holding that the alleged “bare procedural violation” did not “present[] a material risk of harm to the underlying concrete interest Congress sought to protect in passing FACTA”— preventing identity theft and credit card fraud—the court viewed as “dispositive” Congress’s findings in the Clarification Act. 861 F.3d at 81. Specifically, the court pointed to Congress’s finding that “[e]xperts in the field BASSETT V. ABM PARKING SERVICES 9 agree that proper truncation of the card number, . . . regardless of the inclusion of the expiration date, prevents a potential fraudster from perpetrating identity theft or credit card fraud.” Id. (alteration in original) (quoting 122 Stat. at 1565). That statement “ma[de] clear that Congress did not think that the inclusion of a credit card expiration date on a receipt increases the risk of material harm of identity theft,” particularly in light of Congress’s concern about “abusive” FCRA lawsuits. Id.