- to give that 50 bucks to me you would require some information from me. Just post it here and we'll upvote you, 'k? (You are trivializing access to such personal info. Just post it all here to prove your point.)

- blocking all those sites [your other comment] disables functionality.

y: so what? here you can have everything you need from me [for e.g. identity theft] for 50 bucks!

me: that's the price of a cheap date! you don't appear to value it at all. so why don't you just post it here?

hope that clears it up.

180M USD to represent the rights of people who didn't ask for your help.

Just an idea for those organizations - maybe create some browser addon or more user friendly claim form to easily donate such type of claims to them.

All the best to the rest of non-plaintiffs from US then. May they get some money too, though I highly doubt it.

    facebookuserprivacysettlement.com
    www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com
    adsrvr.org
    js.adsrvr.org
    digitaldisbursements.com
    content.digitaldisbursements.com
    fonts.googleapis.com
    google.com
    zdassets.com
    static.zdassets.com

    facebookuserprivacysettlement.com
    www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com
    adsrvr.org
    js.adsrvr.org
    digitaldisbursements.com
    content.digitaldisbursements.com
    fonts.googleapis.com
    google.com
    zdassets.com
    static.zdassets.com

It would be funny to have a wild west subnet of the internet where ddos and hacking was something you signed s EULA for on the way in…

Also I don't expect GP convincing HN users to protest or to reach out older relatives, or whatever would help the 60+ fb users, but my comment convincing HN users to not to do that.

That seems unlikely. It come across more as a passive complaint about the comment. A sort of “Why are you bothering me with this?”. I doubt you believe the other person wasn’t aware of blocking abilities, as you provided no actual assistance in that direction either.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribu...

(My sample is not representative, but the bias is probably more towards tech and having a college degree than in the other directions.)

Sorry for my angry post.

So much crap now....

They should be like the rest of and just get on with it.

"Right to face your accuser" and all that.

> If you are a Settlement Class Member and you do nothing, you will give up the rights explained in Question 9, including your right to start a lawsuit, continue a lawsuit, or be part of any other lawsuit against the Defendant and the Released Parties about the legal issues or factual allegations resolved by this Settlement. In addition, you will not receive a payment from this Settlement

How can I give up my rights like this?, especially with regard to a case I may easily not have heard about. I'm in this class, but wouldn't know about it if it wasn't for this post.

Having said that, I assume they are required to make an honest effort to notify affected folks, I got a notification directly in my Facebook notifications a bit ago.

At the end of the day they aren't required to cover every edge case or possible contingency. Like the other person said, its a compromise. If everyone had to file individually, most would never get justice. The settlement gets evaluated for reasonableness by the court for exactly this issue. Not everyone is going to be reachable. For the fraction that aren't, would a reasonable person consider this an acceptable outcome?

At the end of the day its a decent solution to a thorny problem. If there's a better one then by all means propose it to some legal thinkers. But as it stands now, over the course of a very long time legal minds have decided on this and it works alright.

Do you have a good reason to believe that we can consider negligible the proportion of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are not aware of its existence and their rights and responsibilities? Can you show that it's probable that they're not in the majority?

The problem may be thorny, but you haven't made a convincing argument that this solution is decent. The law (in some countries more than others) is full of unsatisfying compromise, and not for lack of good ideas.

Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties. I agree that it's the status quo and people aren't rioting over it, but that's hardly the consensus of hundreds of years of jurisprudence.

>Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties.

I presume you're speaking of the US, but just a month ago (went into effect June 25th) the EU opened up and simplified their class action scheme ('Directive on Representative Actions') to make it simpler and easier to file class action suits and largely remove borders and jurisdiction squabbles from the discussion. This US style system was set up specifically because it better protects consumers.

Quoting from the EU themselves:

>However, the consumers affected may feel powerless and hesitate to take legal actions. They might be confronted to obstacles such as the uncertainty about their rights or about which procedural mechanisms are available, psychological reluctance to take action or the negative balance of the expected costs relative to the benefits of the individual action. Collective redress mechanisms, such as the one provided by Directive (EU) 2020/1828 are therefore needed to overcome the obstacles faced by consumers in individual actions.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...

It's not really the set of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are unaware of it that is relevant here. The relevant set is the subset of that group that would choose not to be in this settlement and also would individually sue Facebook over the legal issues and factual allegations involved in the class action.

I would expect that most people who are sufficiently concerned over the Facebook activities involved in this class action to actually individually sue would have already done so or at least started preparing to do so long ago and as part of that would have kept track of other lawsuits that overlapped with theirs.

Why is a company continuing to be responsible for its past actions problematic?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_23

IANAL.

It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

> Finally, in between the door and the TVs, I added a live alligator, which would hopefully force customers who made it this far to reconsider their decision to take advantage of the great offer.

https://youtu.be/XbC0-tuYE2o?t=128

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

> Unless you opt out of the settlement, you are automatically part of the Settlement. If you do nothing, you will not get a payment from this Settlement and you will give up the right to sue, continue to sue, or be part of another lawsuit against the Defendant related to the legal claims or factual allegations resolved by this Settlement.

What if I say I've been there, but haven't. Will anything bad happen to me?

Though, it's probably unlikely you get caught, and unless you're filing scores of forms it's unlikely they'd bother pressing charges.

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

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?

> 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 )

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

$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.

(I am not a lawyer, take this with a grain of salt.)

This is really the kind of thing that should be behind a .gov TLD or something of that nature.

https://angeion-public.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/Privacy_Policy....

I go on the assumption that anything I ever reveal on the internet will become public knowledge at some point.

But physically hiding or locking up your secrets still works.

I keep my seashell in a Farraday bag when I'm not using it. When I am, I put on a Farraday Helmet (tm) so the shell is inside it.

Beat that!

Like this: https://www.numerama.com/sciences/28339-google-affiche-sa-co...

Or hack into the legit sites themselves if their cybersecurity practices are subpar.

I don't need to tell you where I sleep.

Usually, I go to a source that I trust such as a particular news organization or an actual .gov site in order to verify. Then, I check another source that I trust.

Definitely annoying, but it only takes a minute or two. Honestly.

It’s interesting that you say that it should be behind a .gov or a particular TLD. Have you ever tried to reclaim “lost” money/property from your state’s treasury department? Those sites usually don’t have .gov or a specific TLD either.

For example, for Massachusetts the site is https://findmassmoney.com. It does seem questionable initially lol. But it only took a minute for me to verify that this is the site that the state government site “mass.gov” links to.

I can’t word this properly now but I wonder if the purpose of the url (similar to marketing strategies) is to get as many people to go to the site as possible.

Seriously though, where's the punitive aspect of the system here?

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

But for whom?

The system is broken, because these things are just a cost of doing business for companies violating rights. They suffer no consequences and likely any settlement or fine will just be recouped from higher fees or already being factored in.

I think these things will never change until regulators start taking it seriously. I think if Meta was forced to be closed down or had to close the part of business that caused a violation, maybe other players would have taken those issues more seriously.

At the bottom it says its perjury if you put any wrong info in. Facebook was around for years by then and was already successful by the earliest date they allow

You can't threaten perjury on a form like this and be sloppy in your questions. If it were a paper form I could at least annotate my answer, but here I'm stuck with the wording they use.

So many people will lose the right to fight FB over this without ever knowing what they lost…

Anyway, I used a fake birth date on FB, so probably not valid anyways.

https://www.refererheadersettlement.com/

I keep getting an "Unexpected Error has Occurred"...how convenient.