A proposed class-action suit has been filed [PDF] in California on behalf of Ashley Madison users who had their personal information leaked, including those who paid the site a fee for a “full delete” of their data.

After a breach of the site's database, people combing through the information found that Ashley Madison and other properties owned by parent company Avid Life Media (ALM) had retained quite a bit of information pertaining to users who purchased a “full delete” of their profile for $19, including GPS coordinates, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, among other details. Although e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions written by users who sought “full deletes” were eliminated by the time the hackers accessed the database, the incidental data that Ashley Madison kept on those users could still paint quite a picture. The Register has a table that nicely illustrates what information Ashley Madison kept on “deleted” users and what it actually deleted.

In addition, when Ars investigated the “full delete” option on Ashley Madison a year ago, we found that there was little difference between a “full delete” and the “hiding your profile” option, except that messages that a user sent to another user would be deleted if exiting users paid the fee.

The complaint alleges that “among the data compromised and downloaded were profiles of individuals who executed the option to scrub their user profiles and all associated data and paid $19 to Defendants to do so, yet Defendants failed to actually scrub the data.” This, the plaintiffs say, violated California's Customer Records Act, “[b]y keeping users’ personal data within its custody and control longer than necessary, and by failing to properly and adequately dispose or make users’ data undecipherable.” The plaintiff's lawyers also accuse Ashley Madison and ALM of failing to notify its customers of the data breach in a timely manner.

“The claims of the other members of the Class exceed $5,000,000 exclusive of interest and costs,” the lawyers added.

Lawyers in New York and Missouri have also tried to organize class action suits against Ashley Madison in the wake of the breach. But the outcomes of these suits are far from certain. As Ars wrote earlier this week, the plaintiffs are likely to be unsympathetic to juries, and finding people willing to draw attention to their Ashley Madison accounts in a court of law could prove difficult. On top of that, class-action settlements usually result in minuscule payouts for the people affected by any wrongdoing.