Google+ Class Action Starts Paying Out $2.15 For G+ Privacy Violations

Ron Amadeo writing via Ars Technica: Who remembers the sudden and dramatic death of Google+? Google's Facebook competitor and "social backbone" was effectively dead inside the company around 2014, but Google let the failed service hang around for years in maintenance mode while the company spun off standalone products. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google+ had exposed the private data of "hundreds of thousands of users" for years, that Google knew about the problem, and that the company opted not to disclose the data leak for fear of regulatory scrutiny. In the wake of the report, Google was forced to acknowledge the data leak, and the company admitted that the "private" data of 500,000 accounts actually wasn't private. Since nobody worked on Google+ anymore, Google's "fix" for the bug was to close Google+ entirely. Then the lawsuits started.

Today's class-action lawsuit, Matt Matic and Zak Harris v. Google, was filed in October 2018 and blames Google's "lax approach to data security" for the bugs. The complaint added, "Worse, after discovery of this vulnerability in the Google+ platform, Defendants kept silent for at least seven months, making a calculated decision not to inform users that their Personal Information was compromised, further compromising the privacy of consumers' information and exposing them to risk of identity theft or worse." The case website with full details is at googleplusdatalitigation.com. The case was settled in June 2020, with Google agreeing to pay out $7.5 million. After losing about half of that money to legal and administrative fees, and with 1,720,029 people filling out the right forms by the October 2020 deadline, the payout for each person is a whopping $2.15.

Toothless

[crmarvin42]

This is why class action lawsuits are more about the lawyers cashing in, than about restitution or deference

Google makes far more than that per user, and so this in no way incentivizes them to do otherwise next time

Victims will get a token amount of money not even worth the hassle of filling out the paperwork to get the payout, and so they will in no way be made whole for being victimized by google

And all of that is before we consider how long has elapsed between the violation of privacy and the payout of the "penalty".

The only winners here are Google (they made more money than it cost them, even after considering lawyers fees), and the lawyers (who get repaid from the settlement before the class members do). Everyone else is window dressing to this farce.

Class action lawsuits should require penalties 2x the money made by the offending party to offset the time and legal fees at a MINIMUM.

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[aerogems]

While I agree that like $2/person is insultingly low, that doesn't have anything to do with it being a class action lawsuit. It has everything to do with the lawyers supposedly representing the users failing their fiduciary duty to their clients. They know even the total amount is pocket change to a company like Google, and executives probably spend more than that on hookers and blow at the company christmas parties, so it's not going to deter this kind of behavior in the future. However, the cut the lawyer

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[AleRunner]

This is why class action lawsuits are more about the lawyers cashing in, than about restitution or deference

The class action is not really about getting major restitution. It's aim is to ensure that

a) there is some level of punishment for such breaches of law that would otherwise go ignored and
b) the fact that something bad happened gets registered so that Google can't continue doing that in future, claiming that they weren't doing it or didn't know

In the normal case, if you found out that Google had done bad things to you worth $20, would you dedicate months of your life to proving that? Would you fight throug

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[crmarvin42]

a) there is some level of punishment for such breaches of law that would otherwise go ignored and b) the fact that something bad happened gets registered so that Google can't continue doing that in future, claiming that they weren't doing it or didn't know

So what you are saying is that Class Action lawsuits are kind of a poor mans Qualified Immunity. No one gets a serious punishment unless they have broken that exact law the same way at least once before. Otherwise it's a slap on the wrist and a stern "Don't do that again"? Yeah, that's not good enough for me.

"Oh no, lawyers getting money!!!" you scream.

Re-read my post. I was not complaining that the the lawyers get paid. Nor was I complaining about the size of their fee. Only that the size of the penalty was not sufficient to ensure the class members

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[AleRunner]

"Oh no, lawyers getting money!!!" you scream.

Re-read my post. I was not complaining that the the lawyers get paid. Nor was I complaining about the size of their fee. Only that the size of the penalty was not sufficient to ensure the class members ALSO benefited from the settlement meaningfully. The lawyers fees should be on-top of the class settlement IMO.

I understand and kind of agree with what you are saying, however it's a feature, not a bug, of the class action system. The penalty should fit the crime. If the crime was $0.50 per person then even with 400% penalties beyond the damages there's barely going to be enough to pay for an envelope. It's completely fine if the lawyers get most of the award (which should also include part of their fees) in this case.

There's a separate question about whether corporates get away with far too small fines in Americ

What is the problem?

[Aighearach]

Most of those 1.7m people didn't have any losses, so why should they get more?

I got $32 from a class action where the company had telephoned me improperly. I was actually inconvenienced. Slightly.

Here, nobody was inconvenienced, and the main point of the lawsuit was to force google to stop doing it, and punish them. There is nothing wrong with rewarding the lawyers, who were the ones who caused google to stop doing it, and caused the punishment to exist.

And if they do it again, this case will make the next

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[AleRunner]

Why do people get so whiny over lawyers? They did something good here.

Mostly big company propaganda. This costs the big companies money and means they have to follow the laws like everyone else, which is highly inconvenient. If big companies can persuade people the lawyers are the bad people here then they can more easily get away with enforcing things like binding arbitration which (mostly) make it easier for them to ignore the law. They have a load of astroturfing campaigns against such things and then a load of suckers get taken in and start parroting the "talking points"

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[N1AK]

Google lost their data, how exactly would you know if they did or didn't have any losses resulting from this? If someone asked me how much I had to be paid to approve a phonecall being made vs approve distribution of my private information I would expect considerably more compensation for the private information. Your welcome to your interpretation of relative harm but it certainly isn't one I share.

This case is not a shining example of the benefit of class actions. Google's cost from this is neglible, c

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[Aighearach]

They have a choice to join the class, or to sue separately. If they had some sort of real losses, their lawyer advised them to sue separately, because since other class members didn't have losses, the settlement wouldn't recover that much.

But if there were many class members with losses, there would be a tiered settlement, where those with losses would get more.

That's just how it always works. Try to remember for next time, ok?

Better late than....

[freeschwag]

Any particular reason it took an entire year to report on this? Standard gov't methodology perhaps? Just wait until any one that cares goes away or dies.

Hiding something, nah we published everything freely "cough cough" 20 years after the fact "cough cough" magic bullet

Class actions are useless

[NoMoreDupes]

Other than making the lawyers (on both sides) rich, it's basically useless - the people affected don't get any justice, and the penalty's always pocket change for the guilty party (which, of course, never admits to any guilt).

Wow

[backslashdot]

Ok, we get $2.15 cents, the lawyers get millions, and Google gets a list of which of their G+ users are suckers. It's a win-win. Well close enough almost, 2 out 3 winners ain't bad.

When do we start doing this right?

[rickb928]

Have the court decide on appropriate damages for the class. $2.15? C'mon, man, a real amount, huh? I once got a check for $0.38 as a class-action settlement.

Then decide on what amount would be punitive enough to give the offending corporation an incentive to not do that again... And that, for Google, is a LOT.

And then, after that, fix legal costs.

As it is, legal firms see this as THEIR case, the class members being an expense. That doesn.t seem right.

"Your privacy is important to us"...

[mark-t]

"When we say this, we mean it as an aggregate, not that you specifically are in any way particularly important to us. Obviously the privacy of our users (plural) is important to us, but the worth that we place on the privacy of any single user is necessarily proportionately less valuable, and any settlements that might be reached with a single individual when privacy violations occur (not if, but when) will of course be reflective the value that we place on that individual's privacy alone. Usage of our se