Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#41

Post by mandmandam »

juliangmp wrote: post #37
rkagerer wrote: post #33

Am I the only one a little bit sickened that the multi-billion dollar lawsuit is to the [potential] benefit of investors, rather than the users who were harmed?

What harmed users? They agreed to all of this when signing up

Nope.

> Cambridge Analytica later obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people’s friends — including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

- https://apnews.com/article/c8f615be9523421998b4fcc16374ff37

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#42

Post by parsimo2010 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #15

I think I understand the CA scandal well, but how could it be reasonably expected for Facebook to give investors adequate notice that a third party could misuse their targeted ads feature (to my knowledge CA did not hack FB, they simply used targeted ads)? It's as if expecting recently IPO'd Beyond Meat to disclose to investors the possibility that someone might choke on a meatball they make with the meat...

Regular risks/hazards that are present for every product don’t need to be disclosed, but if there is something about your product that presents a unique risk, you need to disclose it to investors. Investors normally don’t worry about mundane risks being disclosed, so there will probably be statements like “if the overall plant-based food sector does not grow as fast as our projections then we may not hit our growth/profitability targets next quarter,” which is totally expected and usually disclosed. In your example, if Beyond knew that their plant-based meatballs were harder to chew/swallow than regular meat-based meatballs, and there were emails showing that executives knew and chose not to say anything about it to investors, then they could be sued if people choked and an ensuing scandal hurt the stock price.

Similarly, the FB investors are hoping to show that FB executives knew something more about Cambridge Analytica and chose not to disclose it, or chose to downplay the risk. That’s fraud. The issue isn’t that something bad happened, investors have to take risks. The issue is whether FB knew, and misled investors by lying or intentionally misleading wording.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#43

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

juliangmp wrote: post #37
rkagerer wrote: post #33

Am I the only one a little bit sickened that the multi-billion dollar lawsuit is to the [potential] benefit of investors, rather than the users who were harmed?

What harmed users? They agreed to all of this when signing up

Users are dumb enough to agree to harm themselves. Intellectually honest libertarianism requires looking the resulting tragedies in the eye and saying “this sucks but government worse,” not raw denialism.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#44

Post by mandmandam »

yard2010 wrote: post #19
nine_zeros wrote: post #2

Really funny how the US Court system becomes really interested in cases as soon as shareholders file a lawsuit. When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster.

As I see this: the US is built on money. Money is the most valued thing. So if someone hurts your basic need of shelter food or water no one cares. If someone makes you lose money or makes your investment go bad the court will intervene. Although it might sound awful I don't think it is necessarily that way. I just wish it could be more balanced. But then again, I'm a foreigner, I know nothing about the US.

> If someone makes you lose money or makes your investment go bad the court will intervene.

Yes, but there's a very important caveat: Only if you still have enough money to pay experienced lawyers at least >$50k to make that happen (and more money, to ensure your own lawyers are at least a little worried about any potential malpractice suit).

However corrupt you think the US legal system is, I guarantee you it's worse. But you're basically 100% correct; money is the most valued thing.

In many circles, of every socioeconomic class, things like honesty and integrity are openly derided - they get in the way of making money. Somehow, protecting people's basic needs falls into that class too. It's shockingly stupid, yet somehow normal - and even spun as a good thing - 'freedom'.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#45

Post by jajko »

dataflow wrote: post #29
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers. If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer. As an investor, you typically need a lawyer, but with that hurdle met you're…

> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. [...] If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer. Are you living in the same reality where e.g. the US has vigorously broken up monopolies the past few decades, prevented mergers that hurt consumers, constantly enforced laws like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and preven…

Do you seriously believe we still live in such world? I'll start believing when I will see breakups of for example: Boeing, Meta, Google.

I am not holding my breadth regardless of who is in white house, not even for single one.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#46

Post by TwentyPosts »

rkagerer wrote: post #33

Am I the only one a little bit sickened that the multi-billion dollar lawsuit is to the [potential] benefit of investors, rather than the users who were harmed?

The reality is that it's much easier to bring a lawsuit over damage done to shareholders (dropped stock value is measurable and easy to see, security fraud), than it is to bring a lawsuit over damage done to users (harm done to individual users is hard to measure).

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#47

Post by Y-bar »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #40
rkagerer wrote: post #33

Am I the only one a little bit sickened that the multi-billion dollar lawsuit is to the [potential] benefit of investors, rather than the users who were harmed?

If you (a user) can demonstrate actual harm done to you from the Cambridge Analytica scandal then you can sue too. But you were already giving your data freely to Facebook to sell you targeted ads, so you’re going to have an uphill battle in how getting targeted political ads from Cambridge derived analysis harmed you. Not in a sense like “the wrong person got elected so I was theoretically harmed” because I doubt yo…

True.

Proving damages by externalities is very hard unfortunately.

For example I remember a case where foresters around here tried to sue coal companies for the acidified rain which killed a lot of pines and saplings and cost them a lot of money.

The courts denied any compensation because they should have known acid rain was a risk and they could not prove which sulphur compound molecules originated from which company. And I suppose courts would treat misuse of personal data the same.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#49

Post by moffkalast »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6
nine_zeros wrote: post #2

Really funny how the US Court system becomes really interested in cases as soon as shareholders file a lawsuit. When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster.

> When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers. If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer. As an investor, you typically need a lawyer, but with that hurdle met you're…

> puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.

I think you've got consumers and investors swapped there. Take a look at the EU, US consumers have extremely few protections.

Re: Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta

#50

Post by ajvs »

curt15 wrote: post #36
ajvs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the pervasive myth that conservative voices are somehow being censored or silenced, despite lots of evidence that conservative rage-bait gets disproprotionately more distribution on recommendation algorithms It can be true that both conservative content gets more widely shared AND that they're still being censored. There were countless high-profile conservatives banned from pre-Musk Twitter, YouTube and other socia…

>likewise there's clear and obvious cases of conservative content being silenced like Donald Trump's interview on Joe Rogan kept off the YouTube trending page as the most recent example. This is news to me. I learned about both the Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan interviews from my Youtube front page.

For several days it wasn't viewable to many people, even if you specifically searched for it[1], YouTube later addressed the outrage and resolved this[2].

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1850982018064269423 [2] https://x.com/YouTubeInsider/status/1851016296269242434

Post reply on HN