Facebook Users in the U.S. Can Now Claim Money From Cambridge Analytica Settlement

[aue123]

so the lawyers get 724.9 million dollars wow, this article title should say "lawyers win big in data breach lawsuit"

 

[ericwn]

But it is the same country where people got millions for getting sick from smoking, also it was always obvious that smoking is unhealthy.

Fair point. Who knows what they were thinking back then…

 

[ss2cire]

Looking foward to the future class action lawsuit where someone (Facebook?) misuses all this information we give them so we can get a check for a few pennies.

The cost to print and mail the checks will be more than the payout.

This assumes everyone or most will want a printed check. I submit that most won’t and will take a digital payment. But if everyone applies who qualifies the payment will be very low per person

 

[boyarka]

This is the dark side of US justice system in a nutshell: an operation that if performed by any "other" actor (read: someone from China, Russia etc) would prompt a national ban on ALL services which would spread like wildfire to similarly aligned countries. There's be even some arrests, some political action goinh on, the whole deal.
And what happens here? Fill out a mile long request, receive your 11 USD and change, in return agree to a legal disclaimed half the length of the New Testament where you and 10 future generations agree under penalty of perjury to hold Zuck and Beta free from any and all claims of wrongdoing.

This is just one big scam.

 

[dbwie]

I’m guessing $2.48 is what we will get once the lawyers compensation is sorted out….

 

[Aves]

I’m guessing $2.48 is what we will get once the lawyers compensation is sorted out….

I'll put that in my new Apple Card Savings Account at 4.15%

 

[Velli]

Damn just the US? Not like their *******ry was limited to just us users…

I’ll happily turn down a 1000$ settlement to avoid having the US justice system!

 

[Velli]

But it is the same country where people got millions for getting sick from smoking, also it was always obvious that smoking is unhealthy.

The US justice system is screwed up, yes*. However, after seeing some of the ads for cigarettes from the 60’s, where the manufacturers literally advertised cigarettes as improving your health, I don’t think it was always obvious. I also don’t think individuals should receive millions in damages, instead the companies should be heavily fined and/or shut down.

*(Remember the time a US president wanted to bail out a rapper that was arrested is Sweden, and we had to educate him that the concept of bail does not exist in Sweden?)

 

[fromgophonetoiphone]

And let’s not forget that’s YOU who voluntarily submit the data to Facebook servers. Why do they call it *your* data when it’s in their servers (a private for profit company), I don’t understand.

It’s like if macrumors shared the posts I’ve written on this site with a third party. I wouldn’t be mad, why would I? I’d be mad if they extracted data from MY device without my permission and shared it with a third party for profit.

There's a fundamental difference though. With MacRumors, this is a PUBLIC site where you are posting text for EVERYONE to see.

With Facebook and others, yes you do give up data, but with the expectation of reaping the benefits of social networking. There is an expectation that data is held securely and not mishandled. Honestly, tech just grew too fast and it wasn't until at least 5-10 years after Facebook got popular that we started re-thinking this. That's why we have strict data privacy laws not just for Facebook but for companies like Google and even Apple these days.

My point with my post was that rampant abuse of data occured early on. It's not necessarily rampant abuse by the tech companies but by 3rd parties who could connect to these platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if we get many more years of data leaks from apps that ran on Android devices like 3rd party SMS apps--you need to give SMS permissions today to access SMS, but nothing prevents any of these apps from uploading all your SMS to a 3rd party server and harvesting the crap out of them.