A Washington, D.C., woman has filed a lawsuit seeking $54 million in damages from Best Buy after the electronics retailer lost her laptop computer last year.

The lawsuit was filed in D.C. superior court last November but was publicized in media outlets this week. According to plaintiff Raelyn Campbell, Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy's Tenleytown, D.C., store lost the computer sometime around July 2007, then the company misled her about its whereabouts for a few weeks before finally admitting on Aug. 9 that it had been lost.

Best Buy offered Campbell $1,110 and a $500 gift card in compensation, something she calls a "lowball" offer on a blog she has devoted to the issue.

According to her, the point of the lawsuit is to publicly embarrass Best Buy into changing its privacy policy in such cases.

"To me, the big issue is not the low-balling and bullying tactics, but Best Buy's systematic disregard for its customers' personal information and potential exposure to identity theft," she wrote in her blog. "I am hoping the attention that the lawsuit and this website generate might motivate Best Buy and other consumer electronics stores entrusted with products that contain consumers' personal information to adopt thorough procedures and policies to safeguard customers' property and personal information against theft."

Best Buy can't say much about the issue because it's still before the court, but the company is working to find out what went wrong, according to company spokeswoman Nissa French.

"We're obviously embarrassed and disappointed that we were unable to resolve this customer's issue. We've tried to resolve this dispute and feel badly that it escalated to a lawsuit," she said in an e-mail.

Campbell could not be reached for comment.

On her blog, she admitted that the $54 million in damages she was seeking was an "absurd amount," but said that she chose such a large sum in order to draw attention to the problem.

Laptop thefts are frequently the source of widely publicized data breaches. On Wednesday, Lifeblood, a Memphis, Tennessee, blood collection agency, said it was notifying 320,000 blood donors after two of its laptops went missing. The computers contained personal information including Social Security numbers.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Whitepapers

• Getting in Compliance With Government Data Regulations By Leveraging Online Security Technology
• How to Offer the Strongest SSL Encryption
• Maximizing Site Visitor Trust Using Extended Validation SSL
• Seven Steps to Reducing your Security Risk
• The Latest Advancements in SSL Technology
• Vulnerability Management For Dummies

View more SECURITY whitepapers

Webcasts

• Mobile Data Security
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Key Considerations for a Successful 802.11n Deployment
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices
• Lowering the Cost of Email Archives
• High Availability for SQL Server 2005 Using Array-Based Replication and Host-Based Mirroring Technologies

View more SECURITY webcasts

Special Reports

• The Evolution of Network Security
• Taking Virtualization Up a Notch
• The self-managed network

View more SECURITY special reports