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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

FB users in USA: ~250M, if half of them end up claiming then its $6/person (before expenses, lawyer fees etc.)

In these kind of cases, only lawyers make a windfall.

Class-action lawsuits are a way to punish some entity, but not provide any meaningful restitution to victims. They just provide a way for law firms to reap the rewards of the victims abuse. The victims are even required to give up their rights to sue in exchange for the $0.05 - $5.

It's really messed up.

Yes the downside is the laywers get most of the money.

The upside is there is a big incentive for law firms to punish companies that stray from the law, which surely helps keep these companies more compliant than they otherwise would be.

which surely helps keep these companies more compliant than they otherwise would be.

I really feel like these don't. This is what, a fraction of a fraction of their revenue? And it took how many years for it to get to this point? Let me know when governments have stopped being chickenshit and start threatening with substantial revenue amounts, and better yet, jail time for execs.

The $400 Illinois residents got from Facebook last time was pretty nice.

Lawsuits are indeed an interesting way of enforcing the law. Although what I find particularly egregious is when a single party and lawyer is used to enforce the law for multiple people, keeping the payout for themselves.

For instance, Albert Dytch [0] was a party to HUNDREDS of lawsuits, seeking ADA violations for places he essentially went to only with the purpose of finding something wrong to sue for. Why isn't that money distributed across the affected disabled people rather than one guy and his lawyer? The incentives are perverse.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...

You’re forgetting the year of identity theft monitoring, a $99 value.

I signed up for the $99 identity theft monitoring and lost 10lbs.

Subscribe for more content & receive my free ebook to learn how you can start living your best life and make millions off class action lawsuits! /s

Not true. Victims have the option to opt out.

Which is even worse, because if you don't know about the law suit you get zero and you lose your right to seek legal action.

Opt-out should be the default state.

And do what? Sue with expensive lawyers?

We need a better legal system. We need to end the lock hold lawyers have the system. It's entirely too expensive. Allow anyone to practice law. Ban complex judge and lawyer speak.

These kinds of cases are the only way for consumers to punish corporations, what else would you have them realistically do?

It will successfully punish facebook (the payout will happen). It just won't reward individual consumers very much.

I think GP's point is that the amount of the settlement is not enough given the total number of users involved, rather than the class action itself is insignificant.

In my opinion, in these type of cases, the amount should be directly correlated to how much revenue the company generated from the sale of the data. If the sale of my data is deemed illegal/unethical/etc, then I should reap all financial benefits plus damages.

What's stopping FB from just continuing this practice and just upping their costs to their customers to include this added "cost" of doing business?

It's a good point. More hyperscale excesses would be redressed if we calculated on the greater of damages or profits.

My understanding of the current model is that if {profit} - {legal fees} > {calculated damages settlement}, there's zero incentive not to break the law.

In Facebook’s privacy case there’s also a fine and an agreement to change behavior. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...

Generally, class actions can include changes in behavior as part of the settlement. Class actions also pave the way for bigger class actions if the behavior isn’t changed, especially since they often negotiated by claiming to have already spent resources fixing the issue and their claims and the settlement have to pass judicial approval.

I’m not saying it’s a perfect system.

Every other country in the world has regulators that regulate for a salary rather than delegating to bounty hunter attorneys looking for a windfall.

So the victims would get six dollars each instead of four dollars. Wowza.

They wouldn't get anything as is usually the case in most places outside the US...

>what else would you have them realistically do?

Mob justice

Corporate death penalty and mandatory minimums for executives/responsible employees?

A payout of 100 billion and then the company goes bankrupt. Or more realistically a company doing such egregious behavior would cause customers to stop using it and then lead to it drastically changing or going bankrupt.

But people constantly accept abuse and then forget about it.

In these kind of cases, only lawyers make a windfall.

While mostly true, I've made four figures over the last five years from these kinds of lawsuit settlements. All of them from cases of companies either violating my privacy rights, or data breaches.

I've made hundreds of dollars from Facebook alone.

How do you keep track of them all?

"In these kind of cases, only lawyers make a windfall."

I am starting to think this is by design. Congress is full of lawyers and they probably make laws for lawyers. If I were in charge I probably would make laws that benefit engineers.

That's exactly right. And since lawyers made the laws to ban anyone from practicing law, we get screwed .

people who got checks from the equifax data breach also got about $6 or $7 each person.

I got a $40 check from the Plaid settlement

Didn't even know Plaid had already been sued, now I feel extra justified for shitlisting Cash App the other day when they tried to get me to use Plaid in order for them to deposit money into a bank account whose details they already had and into which they had already previously successfully deposited money.

It was via using Venmo, so yeah, same situation

> That means a lot of people are eligible — Facebook reports 2 billion users globally, including about 200 million in the United States and Canada.

> Only U.S. users are eligible for a payment.

So, less than 200 million, for the record. But, that does not change the substance of your point.

The theory is that the threat of a class action lawsuit keeps us all safer than we otherwise would be. So we benefit from all the class action lawsuits that didn't happen because companies complied with the law.

Suppose only 800,000 Facebook users end up claiming. How much would each person get then?

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