Judge tentatively OKs $725M Facebook settlement: How to apply for a payout

https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/3956560-judge-tentatively-oks-725m-facebook-settlement-how-to-apply-for-a-payout/

by theoldlove • 3 years ago

57 75 3 years ago

thehill.com

gbolcer• 3 years ago

This seems like an elaborate scam. I never eliminated my facebook account, but I definitely stopped using them. I think the Cambridge Analytica abuse is the least of their privacy abuses.

miked85• 3 years ago

What part of it do you believe is a scam? Seems like a standard class action suit where I might get a few dollars five years from now.

Magi604• 3 years ago

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

This is so unfair, I want my $1-$5 damnit!

admn2• 3 years ago

There was one settlement in Illinois, I think it was Facebook as well, where each person who filled it out got $395.

neaden• 3 years ago

Yeah, that was Facebook. That was $650 million for a single state though.

incongruity• 3 years ago

I believe that was the biometric data lawsuit? If so, I was a member of that settlement and while the initial promise was as high as $395 (that’s what made the news), the actual checks people got were much smaller - I just found a picture of mine - $30.61

achow• 3 years ago

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.

walrus01• 3 years ago

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

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

I got a $40 check from the Plaid settlement

azemetre• 3 years ago

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

mech987987• 3 years ago

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

shbooms• 3 years ago

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?

bradleyjg• 3 years ago

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

nisegami• 3 years ago

what else would you have them realistically do?

Mob justice

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 3 years ago

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

izzydata• 3 years ago

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.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

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.

mkmk• 3 years ago

How do you keep track of them all?

karaterobot• 3 years ago

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.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

"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.

apple4ever2• 3 years ago

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

jononomo2• 3 years ago

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

Xeoncross3• 3 years ago

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.

ukoki• 3 years ago

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.

Larrikin• 3 years ago

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

notch898c• 3 years ago

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...

kylehotchkiss• 3 years ago

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

lupire• 3 years ago

Not true. Victims have the option to opt out.

rahimnathwani• 3 years ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

the most famous being Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Did this read strange to anyone else? Did Trump really break people’s brains like this?

d23• 3 years ago

What about it is brain broken or incorrect?

kid642• 3 years ago

Read the rest of his posts, he's on Earth 2

ChainOfFools• 3 years ago

Nothing is. Its just an opportunity to work "trump made u feel bad haha" into the thread.

The whole point of supporting Trump for a lot of these people was simply the delightful thrill of having gained a pet bully that could inflict some form - any form - of grief on people they didn't like, with all the blowback going to the pet and none to themselves.

The same motivation that drives rolling coal on EVs and brandishing assault rifles in public: addiction to petty displays of imagined power over others.

kid642• 3 years ago

Ah, a visitor from the upside-down! Welcome, comrade. Please don't shoot me!

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

It doesn't read weird at all. The CA incident had a ton of stories about it, that's brought in so the reader goes "oh, that stuff" and knows WTF the piece is about. It's the only case of this happening that more than a very, very small proportion of readers would be aware of.

mittermayr• 3 years ago

I have submitted my data, but while doing so, I wondered if I trust these guys any more with the data. This ends up as a CSV on some lawyer's laptop Downloads folder eventually.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

Then there’s another class action suit against the law firm, and so on. It’s lawyers all the way down.

moi2388• 3 years ago

Can anybody explain to me why stealing my data and illegally getting paid for sharing it with third parties means they only have to pay me $6?

Or why fines never include at least the profit (let alone income) from illegal activities PLUS a fine?

svachalek• 3 years ago

There’s only so hard you can slap a wrist, or it starts to hurt or something.

faefox• 3 years ago

Because if companies that behaved badly were actually held accountable our economic system would collapse, and the people in power who benefit from it won't allow that to happen.

theonemind• 3 years ago

I think you can decline the $6 and start your own personal lawsuit for the same issue. But, IANAL.

jmclnx• 3 years ago

So, if I apply for this, Facebook will know my real name and address. I have not used it for years. But I think it is worth the $5 USD I will get to keep that information out of Facebook's hand.

elil172• 3 years ago

The settlement administrator is different from Facebook.

evolve2k• 3 years ago

Screw people globally but in the end only required to compensate US residents. Sounds like a good deal for Meta/Facebook.

elil172• 3 years ago

This does not prevent them from being sued or fined in other countries. Probably just the first of many such cases around the world.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

It's an American lawsuit against an American company under American law. Of course that doesn't apply abroad.

Anyone can try filing a similar lawsuit in their local jurisdiction, but there's no guarantee that you'll win if your country's laws are different.

blakesterz• 3 years ago

The site to submit claims ( https://www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/ ) is showing "connect.facebook.net" being blocked by Privacy Badger in my browser.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised?

kyawzazaw• 3 years ago

Keeps getting

"System Currently Unavailable We apologize for the inconvenience, but the system is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Thank you."

adrianmonk• 3 years ago

We really need a better system for knowing the authenticity of these settlement web sites.

Right now we get some special web site that's like FooCompanyBarIssueSettlement.com, which is descriptive, but how do we know it's not some phishing site?

The site itself always says it's the official site and gives a case number, but there's nothing stopping a fake site from doing those things.

Right now we have to rely on it being reported in the media[1]. That's better than nothing, but why can't the courts (that approve the settlement) have a web site that links to these? Or, as a condition of the settlement, require the company (Facebook in this case) to link to it?

I know lawyers are good at law, not IT security, and I realize this is how it's typically done, but it's still a very poor practice, and it needs to change.

(In this particular case, it's also ironic because the case is about poor practices regarding data security!)

---

[1] And this one has been, including very large news outlets, so I feel pretty confident it's legitimate.

sigmar2• 3 years ago

I very much agree with this. Gmail seems to put every single class action suit email in my spam folder (probably because the domain that they come from are brand new, so understandable). Then the website always asks for a lot of personal information and sometimes bank routing numbers (!!). Maybe there could be subdomains on state gov't websites that are allocated for class action suits (tho that might still trigger spam detection)?

JasserInicide2• 3 years ago

This one at least has the option for a prepaid gift card

the_only_law• 3 years ago

Something similar happened to me when I went to check the balance on a prepaid visa the other day. I got redirected to a bizzare URL and an ad riddled page. I had to do a couple of takes to make sure I was at the right place.

chias• 3 years ago

Interestingly, some time ago as part of my job I tested this out -- how effective is a fake breach settlement website / notification as a phishing vector? It turns out, to my surprise, not very. You can't harvest anything particularly juicy beyond basic PII without arousing a lot of suspicion, and as far as vectors for harvesting basic PII, more "normal" approaches are a lot more effective.

Outside of very limited circumstances (e.g. when everyone is really angry, Hello Equifax!), the average person is remarkably uninterested in filling out data in return for an unknown amount of money, at some nebulously undefined future date, that is likely to be somewhere between $7 and $0.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 3 years ago

What kind of job was this exactly?

exabrial2• 3 years ago

I can't wait for my share of the 50cents allocated to us from the generous lawyers

tzs• 3 years ago

If you wanted more why didn't you sue Facebook yourself?

jononomo2• 3 years ago

The settlement form tells me I can find my username at: "Account” > “Settings and Privacy” > “General Account Settings” > “Username.”

But I don't see something called "General Account Settings" after I go to "Account > "Settings and Privacy".

I looked around, and I couldn't find my username anywhere.

tmaly• 3 years ago

I want my two dollars!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdF_Vo4B6Ms

exabrial2• 3 years ago

725M is a rounding error. This should be every penny of revenue generated on the illegal use of data, regardless of their expense.

You don't get to rob a bank and settle for less than you took.

Scoundreller2• 3 years ago

You are included in this Settlement as a Settlement Class Member if you were a Facebook user in the United States between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, inclusive.

If I don’t live in USA, but used Facebook on US soil, am I eligible?

Sounds like yes?

The form itself says:

Did you reside in the United States at any time between May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022, inclusive?

If I stayed a night, that’s “any time”???

acjacobson• 3 years ago

IANAL - but reside generally means you established a residence there as opposed to just visited.

Scoundreller2• 3 years ago

I mean, some people live in hotels. Or in tents. Or a sidewalk. Or in RVs. The IRS has its own rules on “residence” but that’s usually measured in hundreds of days, but here it’s “any”

beavis000• 3 years ago

But the page title has a blue checkmark next to it!

Judge tentatively OKs $725M Facebook settlement: How to apply for a payout

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