Privacy Lawyers Sell Out Facebook Users for $10 Million
wired.com
wired.com
I've observed that class action lawsuits usually benefit the defendant greatly in that the nature of class action suits is that they deprive any persons with standing from all future legal actions on a matter. Sometimes they get nothing as part of a settlement, other parts they receive some token coupon that usually has restrictions to make it useless. In no case is the opinion of the members of the class taken into consideration, nor do they have any right to object to settlements, nor are they normally informed of the settlement until after it has taken place.
In effect, it's a similar protection scheme to how Congress passed a law banning the filing of lawsuits against BP in return for them paying a fine for oil spillage that is vastly below the cost of fixing the damage.
Many actions that are labelled as "settlements" or "fines" are actually bribes paid to the legal system in return for total immunity from future lawsuits.
The judge also has to certify any class action settlement. And any member of the class may file an objection stating that the terms of the settlement are unfair. The judge reviews the objections (including to attorneys fees) and can reject them if the settlement is not reasonable for the class. On top of that, you do have to notify members of the class (by publication if they aren't individually known) of the terms of the settlement and give them instructions for filing objections before the settlement will be approved.
This isn't to say that no class action is ever settled on terms unfair to the class, but there are a lot of protections to prevent that, and overall class actions are a valuable tool to protect consumers. That's why companies are increasingly trying to remove your right to join class actions by hiding terms forbidding it in EULAs and other fine print agreements.
I wonder if this problem would improve if judgments always expressed an amount per member of the class, rather than a total amount?
Believe me, class action plaintiff attorneys are not falling victim to any psychological quirk that makes them underestimate what the size of the verdict should be. They get paid based on the size of the verdict and are therefore fully adept at imagining every reason why the verdict should be very large. They make these arguments quite clear to the court, and as you say it's frequently by attempting to couch the verdict in terms of benefit per member of the class.
The real reason for small awards is that most of these large cases end in settlements, not verdicts. And plaintiffs have an incentive to settle for much less than the full value of their claim. This is because there is risk (usually quite a lot) in taking a case to trial, so you must discount your expected verdict by the risk you will lose at trial and get nothing.
In addition, it's very hard to prove damage in class actions. You need to show that all members of the class (or at least large groups) suffered very similar damage. If damages vary by individual, then individual proof is required (this makes sense, part of a case is proving your damages) and you will lose your right to proceed as a class action. If that happens, it's basically like coming away with no money, so plaintiff lawyers can't always claim every dollar that might be on the table. They stick to the claims that they can apply on a class-wide (or close) basis.
Ultimately settlements are about taking a sure deal for less money rather than taking a risk to try to get the full amount you believe you are entitled to. That's the way settlements work, and that's often a good deal for the class.
[EDIT] Personally this has resulted in a philosophical challenge because I was under the impression churches were being given a free ride by not paying taxes; this is not the case. They have a constitutional right to not pay taxes.
Is this clever trick possibly accessible to average citizens, though? Is it possible to, say, all join a massive corp. so that our actions are protected us from lawsuits from corporations?
It's especially troubling because this is yet another breach of privacy on their part. People liking pages or apps don't expect to be spokespeople for these companies, so showing my name next to an advertisement is disingenuous. It's made even worse that this is opt-out, and my name is displayed on sites other than Facebook[1].
There is going to be hundreds of millions of people who will never even know that they're recommending products to people, and that's bad.
1. http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/22/3110645/facebook-ads-on-zy...
"There is going to be hundreds of millions of people who will never even know that they're recommending products to people, and that's bad."
Why? Exactly what is the moral outrage that when a person 'likes' Starbucks that that information is displayed to their friends? What did they think was going to happen?
Right or wrong, that's the nature of these things.
It's hard to dispute, though, that entrepreneurial lawyers like this have sometimes forced socially-beneficial changes. In some of those cases, the changes might never have happened otherwise: Businesses have powerful incentives to focus on short-term profits; in a divided government, our elected- and appointed officials find it difficult to implement reforms of almost any kind. As a result, ginormous legal fees to entrepreneurial lawyers might be the (exorbitant) price we have to pay to have this alternative mechanism for reform.
1) Register FB account [name]_[company name], with your company's logo, product feature or offer as your profile pic. You'll probably need a bunch of friends for this to work, real or fake.
2) Like every other company in existence, or at least the ones spending money on these sponsored ads.
3) Have your free ads displayed all over FB, sponsored by the company you liked.
New tactic:
1) Be a social butterfly and get as many FB friends as possible.
2) Sell profile pic and public bio placement to a company wanting cheap advertising.
3) Like every company on FB.
To make a long story short, they apparently ended up dropping the idea, as their site is now back in GoDaddy's clutches.
Given that we now have the means to easily coordinate group action via internet, e.g. group buying, crowd sourcing, etc., what's to stop people from coordinating group litigation. If enough people invidually file suits against Facebook with the same court, it leaves that court little choice but to encourage a class action. Companies like Microsoft can make you agree not to join a class action, but they can't stop you from filing a suit on your own for any and every claim. And if enough customers file the same suit in the same court, a class action may well be the result, even though the customers never sought to join one. And that's because class actions are not about shaking down BigCorp by rounding up plaintiffs. They are about reducing the workload of the court and the expense of hearing numerous suits all with the same claims and facts.
If a large contigent of Facebook users all resolved to sue Facebook at the same time in the same jurisdiction, _individually_, the results could be very interesting.
But its not. Its viewable to your friends only (who may be browsing a third party site). This information is not made public in any meaningful sense of the word public. Only those who were able to see your like on facebook will ever see it in the context of an advertisement. Hence, no privacy violation.
How about making lawyers get paid based only on cash paid to defendents?
scam over.
easily addressed ripoffs like this go on for years, as the people we elect continue to ignore our interests.