$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!
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.
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.