That’s why class actions require the assent of a judge. Because they are a compromise between getting justice for the largest number of people, and efficient handling of the cases. It’s imperfect, but so is requiring every one of the millions of individual to file their own lawsuit, or allowing the company to remain liable indefinitely.
Having said that, I assume they are required to make an honest effort to notify affected folks, I got a notification directly in my Facebook notifications a bit ago.
Is a Facebook notification sufficient? That seems to bear an implication that you're required to have kept using Facebook all this time, despite their misdeeds and general decline in popularity.
They've also been advertising it pretty extensively for quite a while. I signed up close to a year ago I think.
At the end of the day they aren't required to cover every edge case or possible contingency. Like the other person said, its a compromise. If everyone had to file individually, most would never get justice. The settlement gets evaluated for reasonableness by the court for exactly this issue. Not everyone is going to be reachable. For the fraction that aren't, would a reasonable person consider this an acceptable outcome?
At the end of the day its a decent solution to a thorny problem. If there's a better one then by all means propose it to some legal thinkers. But as it stands now, over the course of a very long time legal minds have decided on this and it works alright.
As much as I like being an "edge case", "contingency", "fraction", etc., I can't agree.
Do you have a good reason to believe that we can consider negligible the proportion of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are not aware of its existence and their rights and responsibilities? Can you show that it's probable that they're not in the majority?
The problem may be thorny, but you haven't made a convincing argument that this solution is decent. The law (in some countries more than others) is full of unsatisfying compromise, and not for lack of good ideas.
Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties. I agree that it's the status quo and people aren't rioting over it, but that's hardly the consensus of hundreds of years of jurisprudence.
The rest of your comment is a perfectly valid way of looking at things, so I'm not going to contest it. I think my comment stands and you have a different take, which is totally fine. We don't have to agree. But I did note this section:
>Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties.
I presume you're speaking of the US, but just a month ago (went into effect June 25th) the EU opened up and simplified their class action scheme ('Directive on Representative Actions') to make it simpler and easier to file class action suits and largely remove borders and jurisdiction squabbles from the discussion. This US style system was set up specifically because it better protects consumers.
Quoting from the EU themselves:
>However, the consumers affected may feel powerless and hesitate to take legal actions. They might be confronted to obstacles such as the uncertainty about their rights or about which procedural mechanisms are available, psychological reluctance to take action or the negative balance of the expected costs relative to the benefits of the individual action. Collective redress mechanisms, such as the one provided by Directive (EU) 2020/1828 are therefore needed to overcome the obstacles faced by consumers in individual actions.
> Do you have a good reason to believe that we can consider negligible the proportion of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are not aware of its existence and their rights and responsibilities? Can you show that it's probable that they're not in the majority?
It's not really the set of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are unaware of it that is relevant here. The relevant set is the subset of that group that would choose not to be in this settlement andalso would individually sue Facebook over the legal issues and factual allegations involved in the class action.
I would expect that most people who are sufficiently concerned over the Facebook activities involved in this class action to actually individually sue would have already done so or at least started preparing to do so long ago and as part of that would have kept track of other lawsuits that overlapped with theirs.
Yea. In Sweden we have something similar but it is very very very limited (so in practice they are almost never used). That results in the fact that you can pretty much get away with doing small damages to a large number of people. Because each person would have to sue on their own (and in Sweden there is no punitive damages so you can only recover what damage you actually had) and it doesn't really make sense to sue a company to recover say 50 usd if you have to pay the lawyer 20 000 usd. So class actions are imperfect but I would say they are way better than not having them and needing to sue individually.
Realistically a judge is the last person who should be making that kind of decision. They are theoretically employed by the state to handle those cases, so they should be making decisions which lessen their own workload.
Having said that, I assume they are required to make an honest effort to notify affected folks, I got a notification directly in my Facebook notifications a bit ago.