Hopefully other states and countries sue them too. Facebook has taken massive liberties with our private data and they should be held accountable for it.
The worst was back in the day when Chevy used some bogus primer for their trucks. They refused to say it was their fault owners paint was coming off their trucks sans any rust. A class action was started and then over the course of several years, the government and owners finally won.
What did the owners get? Coupons for $100 off a paint job at the local Chevy dealer.
So not only did the owners not get anything to help them fix their problems, they were forwarded to a local dealership where the dealership could then take advantage of them again and charge them thousands of dollars and essentially make all the money back they were paying the attorney's and government.
That’s what small claims court is for.
It's a quandary. You can ignore it, but that encourages criminal behavior. Or you can pursue it, but proving your case beyond a reasonable doubt is time consuming and difficult. Often, there is no money to pay the lawyers in advance, so they expect to be compensated for the risk of getting nothing.
If the lawyers worked for free you might get double or triple the settlement, but it's hardly better to get $300 off a paint job than $100. The cash equivalent is probably only $30.
The only thing that seems fair to me is if the settlement is held in trust and disbursed with minimum friction to anyone eligible. If Chevy wants to give those people a $100 voucher for thirty bucks if they show their eligibility for the action then go ahead!
Civil cases aren’t generally required to be decided beyond a reasonable doubt but merely with a preponderance of the evidence. It’s more that court in general is often time consuming and difficult.
> they expect to be compensated for the risk of getting nothing
It depends on the lawyer and the case, e.g. most class action suits the lawyers charge nothing up front but take a cut of the damages.
Look at the award from Equifax data breach settlement… The CFPB fine was about $0.66 per person. The class action award averages to about $2 per person.
Could your bank plaster your personal info on a billboard for two years, but make it up to you with a nice paper cup of coffee? (How would you even prove damages?!?). Don’t get your hopes up — that coffee would be too expensive…
Would $1000 be fair for you? Multiply that by 150 million…
Same with the airbag recalls.
The problem is worse than lawyers’ cuts… Proper restitution isn’t even possible (orders of magnitude greater than company’s assets).
At the individual level, a $10k automobile can do far more damage to people and property than just $10k…
But, As a society, we often fail to punish companies that do more harm than good.
No, the cash equivalent is probably $-200 or so.
The problem is that the individuals affected didn't get anything of value. They got a $100 off coupon at the dealership for a paint job there. Which means the dealership is just going to inflate the price by at least that much, and dealerships are already known to have higher prices than competing businesses anyway.
If they had gotten a $100 voucher for a paint job at any paint business, or better yet a $100 check to spend as they wish, then this would have cost GM something at least. But instead, they stood to profit from the "payout".
Gotta remember the quote from Zuckerberg during the early days, when someone asked him how he got all that private data. He said, and I quote, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
This is no better than theft, and it will be defended exclusively by people who have never created a single thing of value in their entire lives.