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Comment by mrosett | Hacker News Reader

This headline is dishonest. I’m not getting my $125 because the settlement fund is dramatically too small. It looks like I’ll get about $6. If the attorneys got absolutely nothing, that number would be maybe $8. So attorney fees are <2% of the shortfall.

I’m not pumped that Equifax is getting off for less than a half billion or that the attorneys are getting a big chunk of that. (It’s hard to say how much they should get, to be honest) But when I see a bullshit headline I have to call it out.

By the way, they based the $125 on the assumption that almost everyone would take the worthless credit monitoring option.

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What I find especially bothersome is that their resolution has, in practice, only cost their victims more.

Because the time needed to fill out that form and provide the documents will have been worth more than the payout, if one ever comes, for just about anyone who bothered to do it.

Not at all satisfactory.

It's expensive to make big companies pay for their misdeeds.

There would be no settlement at all without lawyers taking the case on contingency and fronting the costs.

No settlement would be better since filling out the forms costs more than $6 in time.

The settlement is meant to be punitive, not necessarily amount to a windfall for you. It's not terribly easy in a case like this to even prove damages.

And no, it wouldn't be better to let them off the hook completely. I'm not saying this settlement is _at all_ satisfying, but c'mon.

The settlement is also political cover to avoid dealing with this problem. Without that some more meaningful change could have happened.

I do disagree with you.

Edit: I seen 3 versions of that post so NM.

"I do not disagree with you at all."

Edited my response to be less haughty :D

I apparently screwed up on the edit, but only two versions. I do not disagree with you. I can no longer edit. I blame my phone and fat fingers.

It's a mess now. The gist of my original comment was "I agree with you".

That’s fine, I must have miss read it the first time. Because I re read it noted the double negative and was editing it when I then saw the final version...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Windfall? People are hoping at best for a tiny fraction of the cost of actual damages. That's not a windfall. The only people getting a windfall are the class action attorneys. The actual victims get basically nothing.

I think you interpreted what I said in the worst way possible, and again, it's incredibly difficult to prove damages. We all know they exist, but if you can prove them you don't need a class action.

If it's meant to be punitive, shouldn't the full penalty amount get divided evenly among everyone who applies for the compensation, rather than being a fixed $6 per person who applies? Or does Equifax somehow end up losing the full penalty amount regardless (e.g. is the unclaimed amount paid to the government etc.)?

It depends on the settlement agreement, but they don't typically go back to the defendant. In this case, I found one source without looking up the actual agreement

https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2019/07/26/what-happe...

>Any funds unclaimed after 4-year extension will be distributed in services

>Services offered are for identity restoration, credit monitoring

And those services are from... Equifax, which I feel is pretty shitty. Like I said, I don't like the settlement itself, but lawyers get a lot of hate for class actions from people who seemingly don't appreciate the risk they take in taking in the case.

I’m so so glad they took all that risk on so that I can get $6 while they get 80 million. Poor lawyers, so charitable of them.

And who gave them the right to profit massively off the violation of my privacy. I should be able to sue them. This is not justice, this is profiteering off others misfortune.

Design a better system then, I don't know what to tell you. The lawyers didn't engineer this debacle.

They essentially stole my info and did nothing to protect can it. A corporate death penalty should exist and all assets seized including every paperclip

This company should be "old yellered"

I agree

It isn't supposed to punish the claimants though. Filling out the form was worth less than the payoff. Better to just burn the settlement than to waste everyone's time trying to distribute it. Or give out $600 to every 1 out of 100 claimants based on a lottery instead of $6 to all.

I opted out, hoping that another case would be pursued.

> their resolution has, in practice, only cost their victims more

All class actions are this way.

The only correct move is to exclude yourself from the class and reserve your right to sue individually, after the class action, citing that as precedent.

Class members never get more than a useless coupon or comparable.

Have you sued and had that work well? I'm interested in doing this but I am curious to know how well it works.

I honestly, no bullshit, wish the hackers had simply released the entire dataset. Just drop kicked it into the the public domain.

It would have been the greatest thing ever. This dumb ass bullshit system of credit reporting would have dissolved overnight. Instead we're stuck with the worst of all worlds. Our information is completely fucked, and we're the ones expected to protect it. And we're not even permitted to have proper tools to protect ourselves.

I totally get your sentiment about it forcing reform. What would replace it though?

Risk assessment is a valid concern for lenders. Diligent payers should be rewarded.

I don't think the lending industry would go away with a leak, though I do think that more players with the ability to analyze the data could have come along and used the data set to lower the costs of lending and/or incentivized other systems of data collection/risk analysis and underwriting.

Though I do think it would have hurt the bottom line of the giants that have few incentives to innovate, and many incentives to maintain the way things are.

> I honestly, no bullshit, wish the hackers had simply released the entire dataset. Just drop kicked it into the the public domain.

A lot of systems that leverage data behind walled gardens, collected from the masses and for the benefit of the few could also have the same approach. A couple of high profile "leaks" come to mind…

Credit monitoring, * offered by Equifax *, should not be legitimate restitution.

It’s like Apple’s MacBooks blowing up and a judge ruling Apple can give iCloud storage as compensation.

You mean like the Zappos settlement where the restitution for the victims of the data breach was a 10% off coupon to Zappos?

Which also lets them spam all their old customers who do not otherwise receive promotional emails from them.

I got like 3 of these emails from zappos. At some level you just have to laugh that they're advertising a court enforced penalty.

A 10% off coupon that I not only received a few days ago, but has to be used before Jan 1, 2020. Just a middle finger to the people who's data they were irresponsible with.

This will continue until data protection legislation passes in the US. That’s the only way consumers will have any recourse.

Here’s EPIC’s summary of the legislation options: https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/

This is the correct answer. The problem isn't how the class action suit was orchestrated; the problem is that class action is the only plausible and scalable form of justice currently available. Severe automatic penalties of X dollars per account lost and / or criminal liability for executives similar to SOX is what we need to deter these mistakes.

It is exactly like that. What makes you think that wouldn't happen?

When they lied about their monitor size I got a coupon for a few bucks off my next purchase of an Apple monitor. Never used it.

No this is worse, this is some fucking mafia shit.

Equifax: YOU NEED THIS PROTECTION. PAY US... or else maybe there will be an ACCIDENT with your data

Me: No, I don't, think so. Shit, sounds illegal to me

Equifax: WHOOPS. We had an accident.

Me: WTF? [calls authorities]

Equifax: Well, let us make this right, how about we now give you some _free_ protection as a sign of our goodwill... you know to try it out... just in case that WHOOPS ends up being a problem for you.

Me: [looks at response from authorities] This is okay? This is fucked.

This is state-sanctioned organized crime at its finest.

"And when you sign up, we'll ask for a credit card. And if you don't cancel the free protection, we'll start billing you for it soon enough."

We should have all collaborated to sign up for the monitoring and let them charge the cards, then all simultaneously issue chargebacks when the first charge hit to wreck their ability to accept credit cards and destroy their business.

Where are you getting 2% from?

The 77.5 is roughly 20% of the settlement fund

Or if you want to include the crap credit monitoring it is 11% of the total 700

In either case no one will be getting near 125 but still 80 million is quite a lot for them...

> 80 million is quite a lot for them

Against $3.5bln in 2019 revenues? That's not really a lot at all.

Why are you comparing how much the lawyers get to Equifax revenue?

Because the point of the settlement, in theory, is A) for Equifax to be sufficiently disincentivized from being careless again B) restitution for victims. In my opinion as a victim, amount of the settlement (paid to lawyers or otherwise) is too small to accomplish A, and the amount paid to lawyers, if redirected to victims, is still too small to accomplish B. These are the only things that feel relevant to compare the amount to.

If the two sides negotiated a settlement that involved a serious change of business practices at Equifax, a significant payout to meaningfully compensate victims, and a chocolate cake for every retired librarian in Tallahassee, I'd be slightly confused but I would be unequivocally happier with that settlement than the current one. While you could probably save a bit of money on the chocolate cakes, it would be much smaller than any of the other amounts in the case, and saving that money wouldn't have any real impact on the settlement actually doing what it needed to do.

Spending nearly $80,000,000.00 on lawyers didn't seem to explain to the court or FTC that the settlement should have been higher than mere dollars per person so I'm not sure how spending e.g. $800,000,000.00 on lawyers is supposed to result in anything beyond even less making it out to actual compensation.

It's not like there was some busy public defender that didn't have time to think "gee, these people deserve more than a couple bucks and the company is probably going to make money off this 'fine' once the yearly renewal kicks in for those that opted for the coverage how can we argue a stronger deal" there was a high end team that made bank on a deal they knew they were the only ones making real money on regardless of what the deal was.

I don't disagree about the part that lawyers enriched ourselves, but like the librarians eating cake in Tallahassee, I don't really care about that, personally. I do disagree with the part about spending $800M on lawyers - if that came out of Equifax's own pocket, that would be ten times more effective at B than spending $80M. If you made them spend $8B on lawyers, Equifax might well shut down, and scare the other credit reporting agencies into behaving. That is valuable to me.

I'll be honest, as a victim, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with $125, either. I expect most people will spend it on themselves, but even spending it on credit monitoring doesn't actually fix the problem, it just makes the problem a little less bad, maybe, at the cost of enriching other companies that depend on this ecosystem of profiting off other people's data. I would genuinely prefer a settlement that cost Equifax $800M and got me nothing to one that cost $80M and got me $125.

The lawyer pool isn't "in addition to" it comes "out of" the settlement amount that was already decided previously. I.e. the difference between 80 million and 800 million in lawyer fees is exactly 720 million that was supposed to have gone to compensation going to the lawyers instead.

OK, but the settlement was $380 million. There was no $720 million that was supposed to go to the lawyers (or to anyone else).

If the lawyers had instead negotiated a settlement that got them fees of $800 million, then, because as you say the fees come out of the settlement amount, the settlement would have to be at least $800 million. That would be good for me, as a victim, because it would have meant a larger penalty to Equifax.

Revenue isn't the same as profit.

" Net income attributable to Equifax of $299.8 million was down 49 percent compared to the full year 2017. " https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fo...

How much of their expenses are payroll, and in particular, executive payroll?

https://www1.salary.com/EQUIFAX-INC-Executive-Salaries.html

Apparently the CEO got $20 million in salary.

Edit: The more relevant number is the $6 million the CTO got!

Man I suck: At least the Chief Information Security Officer got less than $4 million.

"2% of the shortfall", which would mean "2% of the 119$ less than the 125$ I could've been getting".

>80 million is quite a lot for them...

Equifax should pay damages related to the severity of the breach not to the size of their bank account.

"Them", in this case, would be the lawyers.

If the lawyers think the credit monitoring is so great they should take their fees in transferable credit monitoring coupons.

Your numbers are incorrect. A handful of attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution.

The claim is "2% of the shortfall" (the amount of money that would be needed to get $125 instead of $6 to everyone in the settlement), not "2% of the settlement amount."

Yes, the attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution. The resolution is so tiny that 20% of tiny is also tiny. The article title is highly misleading.

> This headline is dishonest.

All part of the push to make class-action lawsuits economically unviable. When it's not worth it for any lawyer, the corporations will be free to defraud everyone for small amounts.

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