Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.32...

They are estimating the payment will be around $35 per claimant. The settlement has not yet been approved; this website is performing no small amount of data gathering which the class action lawyers will no doubt use as evidence that the settlement should be approved.

There are a variety of objections. (Imagine if these could prevent the settlement from being approved by the court and the class action counsel wants to make them go away.)

Some of the objections asked not for more money but for the settlement to require Facebook to change its behaviour or to admit guilt. Some argued the settlement was just a way for Facebook to avoid further discovery. Quite a variety of feedback. Angry Facebook users.^1

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.32...

1. There's also some discussion of another website that takes a 15% cut of the claimant's settlement payment in return for the "service" the operator provides. He is objecting to the settlement because the settlement administrator is rejecting the claims he is submitting on behalf of other claimants. https://claimclam.typeform.com

The time period covered is more than 15 years. 187 months.

$35 / 187 months =18.7¢ / month

Seriously? That's all it costs to do this to people?

And it's only even as high as $35 because they're expecting the overwhelming majority of eligible members of the class won't file!

Yes. Because let's be honest, what actual harm occurred? "Someone you didn't authorize to know things about you used that information to put together a political influence model that didn't work" isn't exactly irrevocable damage.

The market will not protect our privacy, nor will the law. The only thing that will protect our privacy is to stop giving the data away, and to aggressively combat attempts to harvest it without our consent at the infrastructural level, and probably to stop using the internet so much because the whole machine is one giant data collection, collation, and aggregation engine. It's what it's good at. Facebook can't take advantage of this data if their warehouses are choked with noise data or their data collection bugs are DDOS'd or nobody hires their former employees or the data just isn't there because people are living more local.

But the government? The government will not protect Americans. The theory of harm here is not demonstrated.

Manipulating people using illegal methods to erode democracy is a massive amount of harm to the individual

Apparently, it's worth about 18.7 cents per month per individual.

And that's assuming it was even effective and not just the technological equivalent of casting bones, which experts are pretty certain it was.

Chaos monkeys has a good epilogue where the author talks about the Trump campaign in 2016. His take on it is that Cambridge Analytica specifically was basically just reading tea leaves. But it's indicative of the larger pattern that the Trump campaign was spending huge piles of money on getting the word out and polishing the image of their candidate, far more than the opposing campaign. The opposing campaign bet on Trump being so unlikable that they could save the money and move it down. Ticket to reinforce Democratic candidates other than the president.

They lost that bet, and the outcome of the election is far more explainable by simply asking where money was spent for classical, legal advertising then by invoking any kind of unproven technology that appears to have really not moved the needle in hindsight analysis.

By all means, Facebook can and should be smacked for breaking the law regarding how people's trusted information was moved around. But make no mistake, 0% of this fine is because they illegally disrupted an election.

It gets a lot more expensive when you factor in what the lawyers get paid

Once it's all over, it would be nice to see how many hours the lawyers put into the case vs how much they make off it. In fact if anyone has these stats on previous class actions, I'd be interested to see it. The emotionally driven and ignorant part of me has always assumed the lawyers are walking away with tens of millions off the backs of the victims that always get screwed over, but that's an unfair assessment without actual data to either back it up or refute it.

Should be some kind of maximum % of settlement for lawyers, something like 10% (not the typical 33%+). That way they're incentived for a big payout that the plaintiffs actually benefit from.

>They are estimating the payment will be around $35 per claimant

Is that based on the time spent using Facebook? ~5 years ago I deleted my account, would I only receive 2/3's of the amount?

Yeah, it looks like it's pro-rated:

> The Settlement Administrator will assign each Authorized Claimant one point for each month in which the Authorized Claimant had an activated Facebook account during the Class Period.

(#8 on https://www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/#faqs )

I believe you deactivated your account like me.there is no option to delete last I checked. The data is intact if you reactivate.

I believe I deleted it, searching shows Facebook provides an option to do either.

> They are estimating the payment will be around $35 per claimant.

Where did you see that exactly? I didn't find it in your linked document.

Page 9.

Aha, got it now, thanks! Right in the introduction. I may have skipped through that part to look in the rest of the document.

I wonder how they are preventing the claiming of several payments?

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