By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//May 8, 2023//
7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Case Name: Carolyn Bridges v. Blackstone, Inc.
Case No.: 22-2486
Officials: Hamilton, Scudder, and Pryor, Circuit Judges.
Focus: Class Action- Genetic Information Privacy Act
Carolyn Bridges and Raymond Cunningham provided their DNA to Ancestry.com, the largest genealogy company in the world. A few years later, Blackstone, Inc. acquired Ancestry in a deal reportedly worth $4.7 billion. Bridges and Cunningham filed this putative class action against Blackstone, alleging that the acquisition resulted in a violation of Illinois’s Genetic Information Privacy Act. The district court concluded that Bridges and Cunningham failed to state a claim. The Seventh Circuit curled that it cannot plausibly infer from the plaintiffs’ sparse allegations that Blackstone compelled disclosure of protected genetic information simply by acquiring Ancestry.
Affirmed.
Decided 05/01/23