A man in the United States is suing dating website Ashley Madison and its parent company Avid Life Media (ALM) in Federal Court, for emotional distress suffered in the wake of the site’s data breach.

The man, who has been named as John Doe (presumably to protect his real identity), is seeking unspecified damage for emotional distress and negligence on the part of ALM and Ashley Madison to protect his personal and financial details from being exposed by the recent hack. The suit is apparently seeking class action status.

The data from millions of Ashley Madison accounts was released online by a hacker group calling itself Impact Team last week. The group claimed to have hacked the website, which courted people in long term relationships or marriages who were interested in having affairs, back in July and threatened to release the data if the site wasn’t taken offline.

In among the data released last week was information from accounts that had apparently paid for a ‘Full Delete’ service.

The lawsuit filed by John Doe claims that the data breach could have been prevented if Ashley Madison and ALM had taken the “necessary and reasonable precautions to protect its users’ information, by, for example, encrypting the data.”

This is the second lawsuit filed against ALM and Ashley Madison in as many days; last week in Canada a class-action suit was filed against the two companies that seeks  $760m in damages.

The news comes as police in Toronto say they’re investigating two suicides that may be connected to the Ashley Madison hack.

[Sources – The Guardian/BBC]