Hardly a week goes by without my receiving notification by email or snail mail about a class action lawsuit settlement that I will receive a piece of.
They’re all due to data breaches, which are apparently common at companies big and small because nobody knows how to protect my data or yours. Or if they do, their actuaries have fun with the numbers and decided it would cost more to guarantee our privacy than to write settlement checks.
Thus, the email or postcard arrives promising a possible payout, which is never a significant enough amount to make a difference in anyone’s life or to make up for the egregiously loose handling of our sensitive information. Don’t get me wrong — I’m happy to receive free money, but the sums in the small print are never anywhere close to those in the large print, which talk about them in the aggregate.
For instance, ParkMobile had a data breach 2021. Class action lawyers jumped all over it and mediated a settlement in which the company will pay $32.8 million. But not to me. I’ll probably get a dollar. I’m guessing the law firms involved get a tiny bit more.
There’s one on my desktop now involving The Retina Group Of Washington, which has locations in DC and its suburbs, where I haven’t lived for 26 years. That dates back to before I started wearing glasses, so I’m pretty sure I never had my eyes checked there. And yet, I may be eligible for a CASH PAYMENT (it’s always written that way, in bold caps) if I file a claim form, which I can’t because I never interacted with them. Why was I even notified in the first place?
Then there was a suit against MGM over its data breach, settled for $45 million. I doubt that made MGM order its IT people to patch the hole, considering the company’s gross profit last year was $7.8 billion. The settlement was one half of one percent of that, so they definitely learned their lesson. What do I get as a member of the class? Maybe — maybe — a check for $75 and free credit monitoring for a couple of years.
Every one of these settlements offers the latter, using Equifax, Experian, or Jim’s House Of Numbers to supposedly make sure no one’s using my data improperly. The problem is the services all overlap, so I end up with a half dozen monitoring services supposedly looking out for my best interests simultaneously, followed by a slew of emails reassuring me everything’s okay.
I keep waiting to get a postcard from one of those credit monitoring services saying its files have been breached, followed by a big check for $11.43 as reimbursement for unwillingly having my data kept in a very leaky cloud no one knows how to plug.