JetBlue faces privacy suit

Five Utahns are among the first to take legal action against JetBlue Airways Corp. for its admitted disclosure of passenger information to a U.S. Defense Department contractor.

A class-action lawsuit was filed early Monday morning in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City, in connection with information that surfaced late last week indicating that JetBlue shared passenger information with Torch Concepts of Huntsville, Ala. Torch, a defense contractor, produced a study, "Homeland Security: Airline Passenger Risk Assessment," reportedly intended to help the government improve military base security.

David Neeleman, JetBlue's president and a former Utahn, last week sent an e-mail to enraged customers, apologizing and promising the misstep would not be repeated. About 5 million passenger records were given to Torch Concepts, including names, addresses, telephone numbers and flight intineraries.

Monday morning, Utah attorney James W. McConkie filed a lawsuit on behalf of five named plaintiffs and a representative class, seeking compensatory — but not punitive — damages.

"We felt that the president of Jet-Blue, Mr. Neeleman, had apologized and had essentially admitted that this was a problem, that contrary to their privacy agreement, they had disclosed about 5 million names to a third party," McConkie said. "We got the sense that Mr. Neeleman wanted to make this right, so we commented in our lawsuit that we wanted to pursue the matter, but not in a way that would damage the financial viability of the company. It's a good company."

The lawsuit includes allegations of fraudulent misrepresentation, breach of contract and invasion of privacy.

"JetBlue has a privacy policy, and it's a strict privacy policy," McConkie said.

Because of that policy, he said, "people feel a sense of security that if they provide information, it is held private. When it wasn't, it gave people the opportunity to discover not only who flew on JetBlue, but also credit card numbers and Social Security numbers. So that's a concern to anyone in this modern age where information can be abused or used in improper ways."

JetBlue spokesman Gareth Edmondson-Jones said Monday that he had not seen the Utah lawsuit and was unable to comment.

Late Monday, the company announced in a press release that it had retained Deloitte & Touche to assist in the analysis and development of its privacy policy.

When asked how the incident happened, Edmondson-Jones expressed regret and conceded the company had been "naive."