Fitzsimmons, Holly B., United States Magistrate Judge
Plaintiffs sought permission from the court to inspect several of defendant Safety Marking, Inc.’s employees’ cell phones in order to prove their claims of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1981a race discrimination, hostile work environment, constructive discharge, retaliation, and negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The court denied plaintiffs’ request because it was overly broad and would invade defendants’ privacy rights.
Plaintiff Bakhit was described as a “dark skinned Muslim of Sudanese decent” and began working for defendant in 2008. Plaintiffs alleged that throughout their employment, they were subject to “derogatory race-based references, racist jokes and comments.” In plaintiffs’ motion to inspect, they sought to obtain any and all information contained on other employees’ cell phones that related to discrimination or bias related to race, including the metadata of where each piece of information originated from.
Defendants authorized plaintiffs to view phone and text records from their mobile company, but refused to allow plaintiffs to inspect the cell phones.
The court noted Rule 26(b)’s right to relevant information, but, quoting Genworth Fin. Wealth Mgmt., Inc. v. McMullan, 267 F.R.D. 443, 446 (D. Conn. 2010), stated that:
[t]his right to information, however, is counterbalanced by a responding party’s confidentiality or privacy interests. A party is therefore not entitled to a routine right of direct access to a party’s electronic information system, although such access may be justified in some circumstances.
Even though plaintiffs alleged that the information contained in the cell phones was critical evidence to their case, the court found that defendants' privacy rights far outweighed plaintiffs' discovery rights. The court noted that the request was not limited and that plaintiffs had not explored any other options or methods to obtain the information sought that would be less intrusive.
The court relied on the recent Supreme Court ruling, Riley v. California, 134 S.Ct. 2473 (2014), to support its conclusion and analysis of the privacy concerns created by the advanced technology in modern cell phones.
[A modern cell phones storage capacity] has several interrelated consequences for privacy. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information – an address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a video – that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second a cell phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible.
The court denied plaintiffs’ motion for inspection without prejudice to refiling. If plaintiffs manage to narrow the scope of their discovery to a narrow category that will not invade defendants’ privacy, including “narrowing the requests in both temporal and substantive scope, as well as limiting the number of individuals’ phones to be searched”, then the court will be willing to consider the motion to inspect again.
v.
SAFETY MARKING, INC., Mark Kelly, Ray Vezina, Phil Brininger, James Cody, Tom Hanrahan, and Jeff Perra
Counsel
Lewis H. Chimes, Maria Eugenia Garcia Quintner, Law Office of Lewis Chimes LLC, Stamford, CT, for Yosif Bakhit and Kiyada Miles.Joseph R. Geoghegan, Gordon & Rees LLP, Glastonbury, CT, for Safety Marking, Inc., Mark Kelly, Ray Vezina, Phil Brininger, James Cody, Tom Hanrahan, and Jeff Perra.