Earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the “D.C. Circuit”) found that inaccuracies in the Department of Transportation’s (“DOT”) trucking database, when shared to potential employers, constituted a concrete and de facto injury under Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), such that the truck drivers had an injury in fact and valid claims for money damages.

The database inaccuracies stemmed from safety citations that had been challenged in state court and dismissed. The citations nonetheless appeared on two drivers’ safety records, which were “disseminat[ed] to a potential employer.”  This dissemination was a de facto injury, according to the D.C. Circuit, in Owner-Operator Indep. Drivers Ass’n, Inc. v. United States Dep’t of Transportation, No. 16-5355, at 11 (D.C. Cir. Jan. 12, 2018). The court did not require the potential employer to actually use the information before conferring standing.

Although the two drivers could pursue money damages, the D.C. Circuit did refuse to grant an injunction requiring the DOT to correct the database, since the “the mere existence of inaccurate information in the database” is “insufficient to confer Article III standing.” Id. The court said that there was no risk that another employer would access incorrect records going forward, since only the last three years of driver safety records were available to potential employers, and the DOT had issued a new rule in 2014 that would make its database more accurate by including adjudications. However, the D.C. Circuit did note that the “mere existence of inaccurate information in a government database could cause concrete harm depending on how that information is to be used.” Id. at 14 (emphasis added). Use of the data must be “imminent or likely” to support standing at the summary judgment stage. The decision could be particularly relevant for databases that are mined by third parties, since those third parties could potentially use incorrect data in a way that might cause concrete harm. Furthermore, if incorrect data can be “disseminated” merely by being transferred to the potential employer, aggregation or reporting services have the potential to increase the original database owner’s liability by making the misuse of inaccurate information more “imminent or likely.”