Legal Insights
Digital Privacy Violations Are a Leaky Pipe — And Once You're on Notice, the Meter Keeps Running
By James Chung, Managing Partner, Pro Veritas Law LLP · April 4, 2026 · 4 minutes read
Most lawsuits are one-and-done events — a single crash, one bad contract, a discrete harm you can point to on a calendar.
Digital privacy violations aren't like that. They're a leaky pipe.
Every day the leak runs, more data pools. Every additional scrape, inference, and profile layer compounds the injury. The harm isn't frozen in time — it's ongoing, accumulative, meter-running.
Once a company is put on notice, the law demands they stop the leak. Continuing anyway turns ordinary liability into willful misconduct.
The Legal Framework for Ongoing Harm
Under California Civil Code § 1798.150, consumers can recover statutory damages between $175 per consumer per incident — or actual damages — precisely because the legislature understood that privacy harms can be persistent. Courts assess those damages by looking at "the persistence of the misconduct, the length of time over which the misconduct occurred, the willfulness of the defendant's misconduct."
Recent decisions like Shah v. Capital One Financial Corp. and M.G. v. Therapymatch show courts are increasingly willing to treat ongoing unauthorized disclosures — such as through tracking pixels — as actionable under the CCPA, even without a classic data breach.
And on the federal side, the Supreme Court made clear in Safeco Insurance Co. v. Burr that "willful" under statutes like the Fair Credit Reporting Act includes reckless disregard of legal obligations. Once you've been warned, recklessness becomes easy to prove.
From Negligence to Willful Misconduct
Continued willful conduct after notice is exactly the kind of behavior that opens the door to punitive damages — malice, oppression, or reckless disregard for consumer rights.
So the next time a data broker or AI-powered company tells you "it's just how the system works," remember this: leaky pipes don't fix themselves. Someone has to shut off the valve.
And once they've been told it's leaking, ignoring it stops being an accident — and starts being a very expensive choice.
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This article reflects the views of the author and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. For specific legal guidance, please consult directly with qualified counsel.