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.
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.
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.
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.