Relinquishing Rights for Facebook Funny Money

I logged into Facebook today to check on a Marketplace listing, and I noticed a peculiar notification with an exclamation mark. I clicked through to read about the recent case levied against Facebook through the State of California. The plaintiffs in the case allege that Facebook illegally sold the personal data of users to third parties for almost a decade, and the judge has ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Everyone who was affected is to receive a piece of the pie as long as they opt in.

To better understand our options, Facebook has created a lovely table for us to read.(1)

While some sources are claiming that the individual payouts will be around $500, I believe, based on arithmetic, that payouts will more likely be around $10.(2) In terms of one’s rights however, whether one chooses to opt in or to do nothing, the result will be the same. The only way to preserve your rights with regard to this matter is to opt out.

Facebook plainly states, “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.” Despite Facebook’s special website and snappy FAQ page, there is not one mention on the entire website of the firm that, along with Facebook, was at the core of this scandal.

Cambridge Analytica, a UK research group, singled out 50 million American Facebook users – myself included, apparently – and fed us targeted advertisements in an attempt to sway our political opinions.(3) A whistleblower said, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

This is a foreign interest targeting Americans with the intention of interfering with our political process, among many other violations, perhaps even many which are still unclear to us, and we are being offered a paltry few dollars to turn the other way. How is this acceptable? These people should be in jail, and instead they are offering us crumbs from the top of a tower because they know that we will not do anything to stop them.

I will admit that I have no plan for how this should be addressed. My only impression is that it would be wrong for me to accept this money. If someone with the right idea comes along, I will be free to join him, having not relinquished my right to act for some measly fee. According to Statistica, in 2022 alone, Facebook generated roughly $116.6 billion in revenue.(4) $720 million is a mosquito bite. It is an insult.

Some may argue that Facebook did not have explicit knowledge of what everyone on the site was doing, but it is fascinating to note what Facebook does choose to focus on. What I am being told to believe is that a large institution installed apps onto Facebook’s systems and leeched large volumes of user data for tens of millions of persons for years and years, and that Facebook was not intentionally turning the other way, but that even though Facebook is the one that ends up paying the bill, they are not upset with Cambridge Analytica enough to mention them even a single time on the site created to supposedly inform the users who were violated. Maybe they think that it is an unimportant detail that a foreign actor covertly interfered with the American political process, effectively using Facebook servers as a base of operations.

Even if I were to accept all of this as true, I would still have to question if there could be other foreign actors entrenched in Facebook’s systems without their awareness. In fact, the latest iteration of the story is that there were “thousands of third parties.”(5) I happen to think it is all false. I do not believe that they are incompetent the way that they think we are.

Sources:

Brandon Gagne, Ready to Work