> Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica...
Anyone following this case and care to share their thoughts of how likely the plaintiffs are to prevail? Is the expectation that Meta will settle out of court?
"The only thing that the lower courts held [previously] is that Facebook can be liable if the statement, in context, was materially misleading. The investors, a bank and a public pension plan, are seeking compensation for the lost value of their stock.
My guess is that the justices will be frustrated by how little the issues on which the parties discuss in their briefs resemble the question they agreed to review. In an effort to offer something predictive about what we might see at the argument, I would point to two things. The first is a deep-seated skepticism of securities fraud litigation held by some of the justices, who tend to view litigation in this area as akin to extortion based on hindsight. The court has also issued a number of decisions in recent years in favor of corporate interests that have weakened federal regulators, including at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the other hand, it is a powerful benefit to the investors that the government filed a parallel suit against Facebook, contending that its disclosures about security breaches were insufficient; the government appears in full support of the investors and will share in their oral argument time. It similarly helps the investors that there is a forceful and direct friend-of-the-court brief signed by most of the most famous securities law scholars, arguing that the securities laws bar any kind of categorical exception for misleading statements made in forward-looking risk disclosures."
>Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump ’s first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
The wording here is confusing. They did not disclose that ... someone else who got the info would do something bad?
From Matt Levine on his everything is securities fraud theory
An odd fact of the U.S. legal system for public companies is that every crime is also securities fraud: If a company does a bad thing, and regulators find out about it, then the bad-thing regulators can punish it for doing the bad thing, but the securities regulators can also punish it for not disclosing the bad thing to shareholders. . . . It is a strange combination: Generally speaking the companies do the bad things on behalf of shareholders—to make more money for them—but then the securities regulators come in and fine them for defrauding shareholders.”
The short version, as I understand it, is that Facebook said a leak "may" occur, but did not say a leak "would" occur, and investors interpreted that to mean would not occur. It seems really thin, but everything is securities fraud now.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for the clarification. Let's see what happens.
> 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 similarly powerful. As a worker, the system seems to presume you're SOL on arrival.
> 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.
I have never heard someone claim that (which doesn't make it false). Almost everyone I interact with says the large investors and executives have far more power - and now far more power than ever. Companies trample on consumers and treat them like crap all the time - I don't know anyone who thinks consumers are powerful.
Use the legal system and you can end up buried in paperwork, discovery, and an unaffordable lawsuit that consumes many years of your life with no reliable outcome. Most people have to settle cases rather than fight deep-pocketed parties. Often you can't even get to court because of arbitration agreements, etc.
Who has done the things you claim? Is there some measure of how many?
> large investors and executives have far more power
This is accurate. Money is power. The point is that independent of wealth, the hierarchy holds. Even among the wealthy, the most powerful suits allege breaches of consumer rights or fundamental freedoms.
> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top.
This is a cool thing to believe, your stories about this must be fascinating.
What have been the differences between your personal experiences engaging in the regulatory system in the United States as a consumer versus the times you’ve engaged with the regulatory system in the US as an investor?
> What have been the differences between your personal experiences engaging in the regulatory system in the United States as a consumer versus the times you’ve engaged with the regulatory system in the US as an investor?
The latter requires counsel. The former can command state attorneys generals, regulatory bodies and small-claims courts and arbitrators who, while imperfect to flawed, are paid for by the taxpayer or company.
I’m also making an in-system comparison. An American consumer is worse off, on average, than a European consumer.
This makes sense. While arbitration may be heavily skewed against consumers due to the incentives created by corporations paying for them, it is often free for the consumer to be ruled against with no recourse. This is a great example to introduce in support of the idea that the system is stacked in favor of consumers becau
> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.
That is not true. Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil. It is not just you become another creditor like a consumer or a supplier would be.
> Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil
Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
> Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
Not sure what the point of your argument is. Many employers get away with bouncing paychecks but you can get the state AG working for you by CCing them on email? The above comment claimed the law favored consumers and investors over employees and I gave a common case where they are not. Not the practicality of enforcing the law.
The same goes for employers too where employees steal or skip work and they are just fired instead of paying a lawyer (if they are incorporated a small business the owner can not represent the company usually) or going through the hassle of collecting proof, filing a factual police report and showing up in court to testify.
Doesn't change what the law is when it is worth it to pursue, and it was worth it to pursue against Meta for withholding material info to investors.
> 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 prevented banks from closing the accounts of customers that are doing legal things they don't like?
It's not funny, it's by design. Property owners and investors are usually given the most attention by courts because they matter more broadly speaking.
Matt Levine recently covered how it's much more lucrative/easy to sue Chipotle for skimping out on their portions from the investor/security fraud angle than it is the customer angle [1]
"Now, my caddie chauffeur didn't need to inform me that holding stock is where people put money that is properly invested, therefore a shareholder lawsuit involves the most heinous of crimes: Theft of money. And the others don't."
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'.
Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that says invading people's privacy for profit, or to provide it to political parties, is legal and therefore not subject to lawsuits or legal challenges in future.
> Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that (...)
According to the article, the supreme court actually declined to issue a ruling in this case. Curious if that causes you to update your beliefs in any manner.
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 you can make that work in court. But if maybe your wife saw the ads and thought you were voting for someone she didn’t like, then divorced you and took half of the company you founded, then maybe your argument has a chance (if you could prove it).
On the other hand, there was a way to attribute loss in stock price that happened when the news of the scandal broke. Investors have a clearer path to arguing that they were harmed, even though they are not guaranteed to win the case.
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.
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).
It's a real shame damage to privacy isn't acknowledged as self-evident.
Of the 87 million or so individuals who were impacted[1], only 270,000 gave their consent[2]:
The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends."
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.
> 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.
FB will settle out of court. Probably a third of what shareholders are asking. Lawyers get paid handsomely on both sides. Parent company has washed away the stink of Cambridge Analytica fallout (remember those bs “sorry” videos and newspaper ads? [1,2]). Shareholders get a pittance.
I’m a bit over this hyper-capitalistic market. When are C-level executives going to pay for their actions? Where is the jail time for these people?
Why should C-level execs pay for what was effectively a Russian think-tank exploiting a vulnerability in their developer platform? Should Tim Cook go to jail because Pegasus exists?
This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Facebook is easy to hate and the facts get lost.
1. It takes 4 of the 9 Justices to vote to take up a case. Given the current 6-3 split this likely means the conservative supermajrority voted to take the case. Why they then chose to dismiss it we can only speculate about;
2. The Supreme Court consistently sides with big business and this has likely been the case since its inception. This isn't strictly true but tends to be a good predictor of what cases the court takes and how it will rule;
3. SCOTUS is and always has been political. Supreme Court justices are political operatives;
4. This court will be inclined to side against Big Tech in general and social media in paritcular because of the war on the (implied right of) privacy and 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.
One final piece of context regards the consequences of misuse of user data by the likes of Cambridge Analytica. Coming up soon is the potential ban of Tiktok. One argument for this is the influence of the Chinese government.
What you don't hear--from either party--is pushing for comprehensive user data protection legislation. So don't let any politican (of either party) tell you data privacy and protection is important to them. It is not. Or they would've done something about it.
> 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 social media. 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.
But these are specific cases, you claim there's lots of evidence that conservatives on the whole get more distribution. I'm not sure I believe that without seeing your purported evidence, but even if studies proved that were the case it doesn't negate the fact that simultaneously there's a large amount of conservatives being censored on top of that, preventing their distribution from going even further.
>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].
> Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica...
Anyone following this case and care to share their thoughts of how likely the plaintiffs are to prevail? Is the expectation that Meta will settle out of court?
"The only thing that the lower courts held [previously] is that Facebook can be liable if the statement, in context, was materially misleading. The investors, a bank and a public pension plan, are seeking compensation for the lost value of their stock.
My guess is that the justices will be frustrated by how little the issues on which the parties discuss in their briefs resemble the question they agreed to review. In an effort to offer something predictive about what we might see at the argument, I would point to two things. The first is a deep-seated skepticism of securities fraud litigation held by some of the justices, who tend to view litigation in this area as akin to extortion based on hindsight. The court has also issued a number of decisions in recent years in favor of corporate interests that have weakened federal regulators, including at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the other hand, it is a powerful benefit to the investors that the government filed a parallel suit against Facebook, contending that its disclosures about security breaches were insufficient; the government appears in full support of the investors and will share in their oral argument time. It similarly helps the investors that there is a forceful and direct friend-of-the-court brief signed by most of the most famous securities law scholars, arguing that the securities laws bar any kind of categorical exception for misleading statements made in forward-looking risk disclosures."
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/11/securities-disclosure-ove...
>Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump ’s first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
The wording here is confusing. They did not disclose that ... someone else who got the info would do something bad?
From Matt Levine on his everything is securities fraud theory
An odd fact of the U.S. legal system for public companies is that every crime is also securities fraud: If a company does a bad thing, and regulators find out about it, then the bad-thing regulators can punish it for doing the bad thing, but the securities regulators can also punish it for not disclosing the bad thing to shareholders. . . . It is a strange combination: Generally speaking the companies do the bad things on behalf of shareholders—to make more money for them—but then the securities regulators come in and fine them for defrauding shareholders.”
The short version, as I understand it, is that Facebook said a leak "may" occur, but did not say a leak "would" occur, and investors interpreted that to mean would not occur. It seems really thin, but everything is securities fraud now.
> Facebook said a leak "may" occur, but did not say a leak "would" occur
They said this after they knew the leak happened.
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...
Yes, companies are legally obligated to disclose risks.
But that’s not even what this is about. Facebook _did_ disclose those risks, but just not strongly worded enough in the hopes of the plaintiffs.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for the clarification. Let's see what happens.
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 similarly powerful. As a worker, the system seems to presume you're SOL on arrival.
> 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.
I have never heard someone claim that (which doesn't make it false). Almost everyone I interact with says the large investors and executives have far more power - and now far more power than ever. Companies trample on consumers and treat them like crap all the time - I don't know anyone who thinks consumers are powerful.
Use the legal system and you can end up buried in paperwork, discovery, and an unaffordable lawsuit that consumes many years of your life with no reliable outcome. Most people have to settle cases rather than fight deep-pocketed parties. Often you can't even get to court because of arbitration agreements, etc.
Who has done the things you claim? Is there some measure of how many?
> large investors and executives have far more power
This is accurate. Money is power. The point is that independent of wealth, the hierarchy holds. Even among the wealthy, the most powerful suits allege breaches of consumer rights or fundamental freedoms.
> Even among the wealthy, the most powerful suits allege breaches of consumer rights or fundamental freedoms.
Could you give examples? The most 'powerful' (not sure what you mean exactly) suits are that I can think of off the top of my head are about M&A.
> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top.
This is a cool thing to believe, your stories about this must be fascinating.
What have been the differences between your personal experiences engaging in the regulatory system in the United States as a consumer versus the times you’ve engaged with the regulatory system in the US as an investor?
> What have been the differences between your personal experiences engaging in the regulatory system in the United States as a consumer versus the times you’ve engaged with the regulatory system in the US as an investor?
The latter requires counsel. The former can command state attorneys generals, regulatory bodies and small-claims courts and arbitrators who, while imperfect to flawed, are paid for by the taxpayer or company.
I’m also making an in-system comparison. An American consumer is worse off, on average, than a European consumer.
This makes sense. While arbitration may be heavily skewed against consumers due to the incentives created by corporations paying for them, it is often free for the consumer to be ruled against with no recourse. This is a great example to introduce in support of the idea that the system is stacked in favor of consumers becau
> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.
That is not true. Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil. It is not just you become another creditor like a consumer or a supplier would be.
> Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil
Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
> Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
Not sure what the point of your argument is. Many employers get away with bouncing paychecks but you can get the state AG working for you by CCing them on email? The above comment claimed the law favored consumers and investors over employees and I gave a common case where they are not. Not the practicality of enforcing the law.
The same goes for employers too where employees steal or skip work and they are just fired instead of paying a lawyer (if they are incorporated a small business the owner can not represent the company usually) or going through the hassle of collecting proof, filing a factual police report and showing up in court to testify.
Doesn't change what the law is when it is worth it to pursue, and it was worth it to pursue against Meta for withholding material info to investors.
> Many employers get away with bouncing paychecks but you can get the state AG working for you by CCing them on email
Yes, this is the practical reality of the law. What the law says on paper that isn’t enforced isn’t relevant to one’s day to day experience of it.
> going through the hassle of collecting proof, filing a factual police report and showing up in court to testify
The point is as a consumer various public bodies will do this for you. As an employee (or investor) you have to do it for yourself.
> 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 prevented banks from closing the accounts of customers that are doing legal things they don't like?
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.
> 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.
Elizabeth Holmes was only found guilty of ripping off investors with her fake bloodtests - the paying customers, no harm no foul.
It's not funny, it's by design. Property owners and investors are usually given the most attention by courts because they matter more broadly speaking.
Another reason is that the harm can often be quantified and remedy easily justified.
Matt Levine recently covered how it's much more lucrative/easy to sue Chipotle for skimping out on their portions from the investor/security fraud angle than it is the customer angle [1]
Unfortunate how that's just how the system works.
[1] https://archive.ph/mhEQA
"Now, my caddie chauffeur didn't need to inform me that holding stock is where people put money that is properly invested, therefore a shareholder lawsuit involves the most heinous of crimes: Theft of money. And the others don't."
(Futurama ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8z1RYf9mM&t=1m11s)
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'.
Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that says invading people's privacy for profit, or to provide it to political parties, is legal and therefore not subject to lawsuits or legal challenges in future.
> Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that (...)
According to the article, the supreme court actually declined to issue a ruling in this case. Curious if that causes you to update your beliefs in any manner.
But it’s much easier to comment immediately with my preconceived notions than to actually read the article and risk that it disagrees with them.
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 you can make that work in court. But if maybe your wife saw the ads and thought you were voting for someone she didn’t like, then divorced you and took half of the company you founded, then maybe your argument has a chance (if you could prove it).
On the other hand, there was a way to attribute loss in stock price that happened when the news of the scandal broke. Investors have a clearer path to arguing that they were harmed, even though they are not guaranteed to win the case.
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.
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).
It's a real shame damage to privacy isn't acknowledged as self-evident.
Of the 87 million or so individuals who were impacted[1], only 270,000 gave their consent[2]:
The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
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.
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
FB will settle out of court. Probably a third of what shareholders are asking. Lawyers get paid handsomely on both sides. Parent company has washed away the stink of Cambridge Analytica fallout (remember those bs “sorry” videos and newspaper ads? [1,2]). Shareholders get a pittance.
I’m a bit over this hyper-capitalistic market. When are C-level executives going to pay for their actions? Where is the jail time for these people?
This country is a joke.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4zd7X98eOs
[2] https://mashable.com/article/facebook-newspaper-ad-apology
Why should C-level execs pay for what was effectively a Russian think-tank exploiting a vulnerability in their developer platform? Should Tim Cook go to jail because Pegasus exists?
This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Facebook is easy to hate and the facts get lost.
Remember all those years ago? Too big to fail, too big to jail. If you or I did the same things we'd be in jail.
Several thoughts:
1. It takes 4 of the 9 Justices to vote to take up a case. Given the current 6-3 split this likely means the conservative supermajrority voted to take the case. Why they then chose to dismiss it we can only speculate about;
2. The Supreme Court consistently sides with big business and this has likely been the case since its inception. This isn't strictly true but tends to be a good predictor of what cases the court takes and how it will rule;
3. SCOTUS is and always has been political. Supreme Court justices are political operatives;
4. This court will be inclined to side against Big Tech in general and social media in paritcular because of the war on the (implied right of) privacy and 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.
One final piece of context regards the consequences of misuse of user data by the likes of Cambridge Analytica. Coming up soon is the potential ban of Tiktok. One argument for this is the influence of the Chinese government.
What you don't hear--from either party--is pushing for comprehensive user data protection legislation. So don't let any politican (of either party) tell you data privacy and protection is important to them. It is not. Or they would've done something about it.
> 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 social media. 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.
But these are specific cases, you claim there's lots of evidence that conservatives on the whole get more distribution. I'm not sure I believe that without seeing your purported evidence, but even if studies proved that were the case it doesn't negate the fact that simultaneously there's a large amount of conservatives being censored on top of that, preventing their distribution from going even further.
>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