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Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

facebookuserprivacysettlement.com

131–140 of 171 posts

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#131
post #75
post #74

It won't allow you to enter a date earlier than mid 2007 for the question that asked approximately "when did you create your account". 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

Yes, It’s only concerned about the period starting May 2007.

Then the question should be phrased to make that clear: "When did you create your account? (Or enter May 2007 if earlier)"

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.

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#133
post #63

$725M is about two days of revenue. Ouch, that stings! I hope they're ok and can survive to improve. /s Seriously though, where's the punitive aspect of the system here? https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

It seems like a racket. Big corporation does what it wants, lawyers get their cut, regulators have boxes ticked, yay! system is working! But for whom?

The system was only ever designed for the benefit of the wealthy

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper can be read, that’s why I whisper all my secrets into my seashell.

everything COULD be digitized these days. I could put a tiny mic into your seashell. But physically hiding or locking up your secrets still works.

a properly implemented Secure Seashell Enclave is pretty much proof against most non-state actors though. What’s your threat model?

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper can be read, that’s why I whisper all my secrets into my seashell.

everything COULD be digitized these days. I could put a tiny mic into your seashell. But physically hiding or locking up your secrets still works.

The good thing is that when your seashell is spied upon, it only produced a soft lull of white noise putting your surveillers to sleep.

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#136
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years.

More like 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.

> I then had all the dollar TVs moved to an area at the back of the store and had a new wall constructed to surround this area that could only be entered through a tiny, two-foot-tall door.

> 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

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#137
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Because let's be honest, what actual harm occurred? "Someone you didn't authorize to know things about you used that information to put together a political influence model that didn't work" isn't exactly irrevocable damage. 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 wit…

Manipulating people using illegal methods to erode democracy is a massive amount of harm to the individual

Apparently, it's worth about 18.7 cents per month per individual.

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.

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's worse: anything you put on a computer will become public. Paper and pen rule.

Paper can be read, that’s why I whisper all my secrets into my seashell.

I guess you haven't heard about the side-channel attacks exploiting frequency throttling of the echos emanating from seashells.

Re: Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement

#140
post #128
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time period covered is more than 15 years. 187 months. $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!

It gets a lot more expensive when you factor in what the lawyers get paid

Once it's all over, it would be nice to see how many hours the lawyers put into the case vs how much they make off it. In fact if anyone has these stats on previous class actions, I'd be interested to see it. The emotionally driven and ignorant part of me has always assumed the lawyers are walking away with tens of millions off the backs of the victims that always get screwed over, but that's an unfair assessment without actual data to either back it up or refute it.
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