Counsel performed a public service

From a recent opinion and order in the Lee v. Springer Nature America, Inc class action case:

Counsel performed a public service in undertaking this case and litigating to further the aims of a statute passed by Congress. In addition to achieving a monetary recovery for the class, counsel obtained Defendant’s agreement to suspend operation of the Meta Pixel on portions of its website relevant to VPPA compliance, i.e., webpages that include both video content and have a URL that identifies the video content reviewed. Dkt. No. 45-1 § 2.6. Public policy weighs in favor of the attorneys’ fee award. In re Canon, 2024 WL 3650611, at 9; see also In re Hudson’s Bay, 2022 WL 2063864, at 21 (“In addition to providing compensation to injured class members, the litigation and settlement of plaintiffs’ claims incentivizes retailers to take stronger data-protection measures.”).

More on the case: 2nd Circuit Approves Class Settlement in VPPA Case by Tammana Malik. Basically what the site did was run a Meta Pixel on pages with videos.

The Meta Pixel doesn’t just feed into what Robin Berjon calls the Fascintern Media—a set of huge companies that cooperate on a global far-right disinformation campaign—but also facilitates ordinary scams by enabling Meta’s machine learning to better match scammers with victims. The latest on that: US senators call for investigation of scam ads on Facebook and Instagram. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that internal documents from late 2024 stated that that year Meta was projected to earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – about $16bn – from illicit advertising. One document noted Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, earns $3.5bn in revenue from higher risk scam ads every six months. (This number is on the low side. Meta ads are placed using an internal auction, and the presence of extra scam bidders in that auction results in higher prices when a legit advertiser wins.)

Sticking Meta Pixels on everything is both a normal social media marketing practice and an action that’s deeply unpopular with the people who get tracked. (Only one person eligible for the class objected.) Serving someone a Meta Pixel, or passing a person’s info to Meta using Custom Audiences or Conversions API, is either a hostile act or, at best, the Internet version of leaving a porch light on during an air raid.

But of course the bigger that a company gets, the better it gets at compliance paperwork, so regulators are kind of stuck. People need private-sector lawyers, and private right of action is a key protection that will help us avoid surveillance dystopia. Anyway, it’s good to see a judge acknowledge that a case like this is a public service.

By the way, every member of the class who sent in a valid claim form gets $1,173. That should get a lot more attention to the stop data transfers to Meta Jira tickets at other companies, right?

More: News from Sacramento

Bonus links

Stiff-Necked. by George Tannenbaum. About ten years ago, I also turned off Facebook and Instagram and about three years ago Twitter. The first two are the world’s most popular and successful child-trafficking sites, not to mention their fascistic politics….What incenses me the the casual embrace of the horror these “platforms” represent. And how difficult they are to avoid. What incenses me is our casual embrace can easily turn normal people, you and me and Fred, into willing executioners.

On Brainrot by JA Westenberg. The platforms discovered that engagement was the metric that mattered, and engagement was maximized not by showing people accurate information or valuable insights, but by showing them things that triggered emotional responses.

2025 was the year tech embraced fakeness by Craig Silverman & Alexios Mantzarlis. 2025 has felt like a tipping point. Or, more accurately, a reversal. Since late 2016, platforms emphasized how much they were doing to fight abuse and manipulation, even if the results weren’t always there. The pendulum has swung back. Perhaps it was inevitable. But you either care about information integrity or you don’t.

EU-US Data Transfers: Time to prepare for more trouble to come by Max Schrems. As instability in the US legal system becomes undeniable and the US shows open signs of hostility towards the EU, it is time to reconsider where our data is flowing – and how long the legal “house of cards” that the EU has built is holding up. (More: you can’t spell #Eurostack without U)

Europe to investigate Google over use of publisher content for AI by Charlotte Tobitt. The antitrust investigation will examine whether Google’s use of publisher and Youtube content breached EU competition rules by imposing unfair terms and conditions or granting itself privileged access to that content. The European Commission said this may have also placed other AI developers at a disadvantage, meaning Google abused its dominant position.