IN EARLY APRIL of this year, after more than a decade of litigation and a $90-million settlement, Mark Zuckerberg sent me forty bucks on Venmo.
To be clear, it wasn’t Zuck personally. That $40.67 was my cut of the payout from a class action lawsuit: the “Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation” case (not to be confused with the “Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation,” payment pending). Since January, I’ve secured other payouts of $21.65, $20.04 (twice), $14.81 and $12.60 as a result of class action settlements, and there are almost certainly more to come.
If you spend enough time on the internet, odds are that you too have stumbled into the class action expanded universe. You’re not alone: According to a recent defense attorney interest group report, there was $42 billion in class action settlements reached last year, “the third highest value we have tallied in the last two decades, trailing only the settlement numbers from 2023 ($51.4 billion) and 2022 ($66 billion).” Given the proliferation of corporate monopolies, legal cases brought against tech companies will naturally include more and more claimants and bigger and bigger settlements. Ads marketing these lawsuits are popping up on social media and, while most people ignore them, there are Facebook groups, lawyers, and hunters like myself, all dedicated to chasing down these payouts.
