Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Prismall v Google: Court of Appeal upholds strike-out of representative misuse of private information claim; 'same interest' defeated by patient disclosures; CPR 19.8 hurdles in England and Wales

Published on: 03 January 2025

Published by a LexisNexis Dispute Resolution expert

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Article summary

Prismall v Google UK Ltd and another company [2024] EWCA Civ 1516 What are the practical implications of this case?

This Court of Appeal ruling does not meaningfully develop the jurisprudence, yet it underlines the formidable obstacles to pursuing a representative claim for misuse of private information. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Lloyd v Google LLC [2021] UKSC 50, which effectively closed the door on representative actions for data protection breaches, claimants turned instead to misuse of private information as the preferred route. The court recognised, however, that such claims are generally inherently ill‑suited to representative procedures because, in practice, individual circumstances determine whether a given claimant enjoys a reasonable expectation of privacy; that assessment, in turn, dictates whether the entire cohort can be said to share the ‘same interest’, as strictly required by CPR 19.8. Where a class may comprise hundreds or even thousands of individuals, potentially, there is a real prospect that a subset will have already placed elements of the disputed information in the public domain (eg via social media). That possibility is capable of undermining the position of the whole group, proving fatal to the representative action. The High Court noted the claimants’ contention that...

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