14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has just been hit with the first lawsuit over the current PlayStation Network outage, with an Alabama man taking the Japanese company to court because it left personal user data fall into the hands of hackers.
Sony, after taking down the PlayStation Network online service last week without any sort of concrete explanation, announced yesterday that hackers have compromised it and might have gotten their hands on the personal data of the 70+ million PSN users out there, including names, email and home addresses or even credit card information.
As you can imagine, plenty of PSN users weren't exactly thrilled that, after a week of no response, Sony finally admitted that hackers might have gotten access to their personal data.
Now, the first PSN user has decided to take the company to court, according to CNET, with Kristopher Johns, from Birmingham, Alabama, filing a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Johns accuses Sony of not taking "reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users."
He also claims that the company didn't warn users in a timely manner to upgrade their security measures concerning their credit cards or other personal information.
Johns' lawsuit is seeking class action status, and demands monetary compensation as well as free credit card monitoring from Sony.
His complaints and actions will no doubt be replicated by other PSN users out there, so perhaps Sony needs to get its lawyer team ready for all of the lawsuits that will be targeted at it in the next few weeks.
For what it's worth, the company admitted yesterday that it took a week for its investigations to reveal that hackers compromised its user databases, and that it announced its PlayStation Network members as fast as it could.
The PSN is still offline, with Sony estimating that it could take another week or so until it is up and running.