T-Mobile and Microsoft Now Being Sued Over Sidekick Issues

Many people have lost data as the result of a Danger Inc. server outage. Danger Inc. is the manufacturing company behind Sidekick devices and is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Two lawsuits have been filed at the federal court in Northern California this past Wednesday. The outage caused many Sidekick users to lose their address books, calendars, and contacts.

Microsoft and T-Mobile indicated last week that the data might be permanently lost. However on Monday night the companies announced that some people may be able to get their information back. One of the lawsuits claims that Microsoft and Danger did not take reasonable care of the data and indicated that the Sidekick was falsely advertised.

One of the prosecutors is Maureen Thompson. Thompson’s daughter is an aspiring model and songwriter that uses the phone to store personal and business contacts. She also used the phone for storing music lyrics that are not saved anywhere else. Thompson bought the phone because T-Mobile promised that the data would be protected no matter what.

“Further complicating the data loss is the fact that Sidekicks, unlike iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones, are not designed to sync locally with a user’s personal computer without additional software and hardware,” stated the filed lawsuit. “This means that most users were not able to backup their data locally, but were encouraged and required to rely on Microsoft/Danger.”

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