Photo Lab Gave Another Customer Scans Of My Family’s Old Negatives And Now Some Are Online

Location: Minnesota

I brought a few boxes of old film negatives to a local photo lab to have them professionally scanned. They’re mostly family photos from the 80s and 90s that belonged to my parents.

When I picked everything up the employee mentioned there had been a mixup with two orders but told me mine was complete.

A few days later my sister found one of our childhood photos posted by a random photography account on Instagram. We messaged the account and the guy was actually pretty normal about it. He said the photo lab accidentally included around 300 of our scans on the USB drive they gave him with his own order.

He apparently liked a few of the pictures and posted them because he assumed they were old stock photos or abandoned negatives the lab had included for some reason.

He removed the posts when we explained it, but he also said he already imported the entire folder onto his computer.

The photo lab apologized and offered to refund my scanning fee, but they basically said since the other customer agreed to delete everything there's nothing else they can do.

Some of these are pretty personal family photos and I'm uncomfortable with the fact that hundreds were handed to a stranger in the first place.

Is this just a customer service screwup or is there actually any legal responsibility on the lab for distributing copies of private photographs to someone else? Also, do I have any right to ask for something in writing confirming what happened instead of just accepting their verbal apology?