Facebook will pay more than $300 each to 1.6M Illinois users in settlement
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I can’t help but wonder if there was some other driving factor here
The legal firms representing the plaintiffs asked to get about $110 million of the settlement money.
And there it is.
Photo library apps can recognize faces locally.
The law Facebook broke is designed to prevent tangible harm.
Class actions are designed to make unprofitable cases profitable. $110M seems excessive but it's only 16% of the settlement.
>And there it is.
Would you rather that there's no profit motive, and they don't get sued at all?
I naively believed that class action lawsuits required at least some amount of actual harm/fraud to individuals.
Sure, it may not literally kill you, but I think a lot of people agree that ubiquitous data harvesting is not great. Illinois took a small stand against that with its biometric data law.
The fact that end users actually get anything more than a few dollars is what's actually shocking to me. Usually it's a case of the lawyers keeping near 80-90% and the rest of the pittance is allocated to administrative overhead, with a few pennies thrown to plaintiffs that weren't actually driving the lawsuit. Or then the payout (if it's big) goes to the state or federal coffers, is another one, with victims seeing no compensation at all. I am actually very genuinely curious about how they managed to get even a $100+ payout to those affected.
The Illinois Supreme Court decided there is no need to claim actual damages. As the article clearly states, there are statutory damages.1 You might think of these as like a fine you pay everytime you violate Illinois privacy law.
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/victory-illinois-supre...
Certainly we can be cynical about class actions. Class action lawyers handling cases with millions of class members probably care about individual class members as much as over-compensated Facebook employees care about individual Facebook users (or internet users Facebook spies on in general).
One difference is lawyers are regulated, licensed professionals who have to follow ethics rules, while Facebook employees implementing and deploying privacy-violating technology for profit are under no such restrictions.
Imagine if lawyers could use all the personal, confidential information they see in the course of their work with clients to finance an online "platform" for targeted advertising. Knowing so much about people's personal lives, they could pass on "relevant ads" to clients. Perhaps they could even promise that their services would "always be free". Fortunately, they can't. However, Facebook can.
LOL
What does Facebook call doing something profitable that crosses a legal or ethical boundary before their competitors can do it?
Promotable innovation, probably.
I don’t know if they operate with impunity.
Compare it to tech, where it’s basically ‘you signed the TOS’, and the discussion ends there. We have yet to see a case where someone argues ‘Your TOS was misleading’, which would be the watershed case we’d need to establish some precedent.
Otherwise, thanks. I feel less unsettled now.
Why are WhatsApp communications encrypted. What can they be used for. Who can use them. Note also that "use" and "disclose" may be two different things. Something like scanning peoples' Gmail might be an example of "use" without "disclosure".
There are only two other states that have a law similar to the one in Illinois.
I'm going to step out on a limb here and say the outrage police are getting out of hand. Tag suggestions are incredibly useful. If I have a library of pictures (and I do), I want software to suggest tags for them. They're my pictures, FFS.
Edit: And the law in Illinois is (to quote the article): 'The statute requires any entity that gathers biometric data—including fingerprints, voice prints, "hand or face geometry," and retinal or iris scans—to get informed consent from those individuals whose data it collects'
iPhoto says "This is a face. Would you like to type in who it is?" And Alice would type in "Bob".
Whereas Facebook uses Bob's profile information to say "Is this a photo of Bob?", leaking Bob's identity to Alice.
Calling names and swearing? Seems like you're outraged. Not them.
That feeling framed all my subsequent interactions with Facebook's burgeoning ad profiling and behavior prediction features, cloaked more artfully by FB after lesson learned not to headline their breakthroughs in computer vision. Boil we frogs on the march to normalization and surrender.
Here's one creepy correlation horror story...
I just started at a new job, so got a new email account in a new domain that I've never been associated with before.
Last week I got an ipad as a gift, set it up with my personal account on my personal domain.
Last few days, I start getting spam from apple on my work email about service offers for this new personal tablet!!
Zero relationship between the accounts or domains!
The only possible explanation is they're correlating the IP address and going by that. Very creepy.
Any lawyer willing to try to cut into these extraordinarily evil companies, I say give them the money. The lawyers are being compensated like SEC whistleblowers in a modern war against vast human rights violations, they're mercenaries in a conflict and should probably be compensated as such when they achieve big results.
There is a vast gulf between 110 million dollars and not getting paid.
Even keeping in mind just how expensive a lawyer's time is, how would say, 10 million dollars not be enough of a jackpot for a lawyer to take on a case like this?
It really does seem like a truly arbitrary and overinflated amount for the lawyers to make out like this. I wonder how many of those 1.6M users would benefit from 50 dollars more than the lawyer will benefit from an extra 100 million.
And the rest of the settlement is still 540 million, so 5 times more than what the firms are making. If you divide the remaining 110 million between all the plaintiffs, it's an additional 68 dollars per plaintiff...and that leaves nothing left for the people that actually did the work.
It's the same bad argument that the McDonald's CEO makes 20 million dollars - but he can't pay staff 15$ minimum wage, even though that 20 million split up between the tens of thousands of employees is a one time payment of pocket change.
Lawyer is a synecdoche for the people actively working on the litigation side. Like when people say "I'm calling my lawyer" while referring to a firm with multiple names at the helm...
And the rest of your comment... did you actually read the comment? I said if you leave 10 million for the cost of litigation they got 50 dollars each.
See how there's numbers between 110 and 0?
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50 dollars is not pocket change for the average person, maybe for people on HN since we work in tech, but I bet relative to the worth of the average person represented, 50 dollars is worth more than the bonuses about to land where the majority of the 100 million that would otherwise benefit them is going.
It's nothing like talking about the McDonalds CEO because the numbers involved are not pocket change if you apply critical thinking, 50 dollars from a one-time payout vs pocket change has very different dynamics for the recipient..
And also consider that it’s true that the users could benefit from 50 bucks more but at the same time they didn’t do anything to receive this settlement. If the lawyers didn’t put the work in, they would get zero.
I guess I just don’t understand why that number specifically is unreasonable. Regardless if a user doesn’t like it they should be able to opt out and pursue a better deal on their own.
If your friend came to you and said "I hired a guy to make the home page for my startup and got charged 1000 dollars an hour" would you say "well who's to decide the value of an hour it's arbitrary"?
After all, there are developers making more than the 2 million a year or so TC, and who are you to say how much effort was involved?
Think about if things pass a smell test, apply some lateral thinking...
No one here knows for sure what the litigation cost in terms of billable hours, but 110 million dollars is a lot of money! If the average pay of someone touching this case was $400 an hour, you're talking about man centuries of billable hours (mind you that 6 hours of billable hours out of an 8 hour day of work is not bad for a lawyer)
In reality the average pay is much lower since even if the lawyers were billing a thousand an hour, the people under them aren't anywhere near 400 an hour.
There is absolutely no reason why the court shouldn't attempt to find a market rate for their efforts and pay that... as I linked to start, it's been approached before
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And on a meta note... all too often I see people go "well if you don't have every fact you must discard any attempt at reasoning about it, it's arbitrary"
Lateral thinking, extrapolation, just building an intuition, all valuable skills to work on.
Your first comment made a good point. Your other comments were needlessly condescending.
Instead people will nitpick those blanks to the nth degree and get bogged down in semantics like "well acthually a lawsuit takes more than 1 lawyer"
It's very annoying.
Or under the impression they do this?
Because if you follow the case info the lawyers based their compensation on a simple percentage from the get-go.
The negotiation from the judge to increase the payout was also based on percentage points.
This approach scales well for smaller cases. People who can't afford representation get it without trying to figure out billable hours.
But as I explain in my other comment, it's worth the courts asking if this scales in a sensible way to cases like this.
However, I do think the US is the only country that enforces laws by "trial by ambulance chasers". Too many ambulance chasers make good money bullying small companies, either through patent laws, minor violations of laws, etc.
So many things about our lives are dictated by precedents set by ridiculous law suits, we don't see it anymore. I went on a bicycle tour in Italy, and the owner was an American. We paid our money and took the bikes. I asked the owner if we had to fill out any release forms, and he said "You only have to do that stupid shit in the US. Here in Italy, we treat adults like adults." The realization of how intertwined our lives had become with the results of all these lawsuits shocked me. It is truly a slippery slope created by lawyers and we are now at the bottom of this slippery slope.
He ended up making a low SDE2 salary averaged out over 10 years and had to put up significant cash and take big loans from his mentor to cover things.
His mentor had to give back most of the 1/2B settlement split 7 ways when the case was reversed around 7 years later.
This was a massive payday. But the firm put out millions on research / experts in cases over the years. It's very much VC Firm in many ways.
In his first 7 years my friend I think was in the hole $700k for the cases, which on average took 3.5 years. Most of the cases barely made any money or lost money. One of those cases paid off enough that he was able to pay off the loans and get to he made this average salary. I know it was very stressful. He also had a different relationship with debt than I did.
Of course, the excessive complexity of the legal system is one of the reasons why lawyers get compensated so lavishly. But maybe that should be disturbing, rather than someone else's fairly earned income?
If they win, you get $540 million, they get $110 million.
I would take that deal in a heartbeat.
I mean think about prop 65 warnings. Nearly every box in the US has these warnings because of one state's law. (Not arguing for or against prop 65 here - that's a different issue - but look at what effect it has on the entire system)