7 ms·

This headline is dishonest. I’m not getting my $125 because the settlement fund is dramatically too small. It looks like I’ll get about $6. If the attorneys got

This headline is dishonest. I’m not getting my $125 because the settlement fund is dramatically too small. It looks like I’ll get about $6. If the attorneys got absolutely nothing, that number would be maybe $8. So attorney fees are <2% of the shortfall. I’m not pumped that Equifax is getting off for less than a half billion or that the attorneys are getting a big chunk of that. (It’s hard to say how much they should get, to be honest) But when I see a bullshit headline I have to call it out. By the way, they based the $125 on the assumption that almost everyone would take the worthless credit monitoring option.

chrisan 7y ago
Where are you getting 2% from? The 77.5 is roughly 20% of the settlement fund Or if you want to include the crap credit monitoring it is 11% of the total 700 In either case no one will be getting near 125 but still 80 million is quite a lot for them...
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  > 80 million is quite a lot for them Against $3.5bln in 2019 revenues? That's not really a lot at all.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Why are you comparing how much the lawyers get to Equifax revenue?
    - geofft 7y ago
      Because the point of the settlement, in theory, is A) for Equifax to be sufficiently disincentivized from being careless again B) restitution for victims. In my opinion as a victim, amount of the settlement (paid to lawyers or otherwise) is too small to accomplish A, and the amount paid to lawyers, if redirected to victims, is still too small to accomplish B. These are the only things that feel relevant to compare the amount to. If the two sides negotiated a settlement that involved a serious change of business practices at Equifax, a significant payout to meaningfully compensate victims, and a chocolate cake for every retired librarian in Tallahassee, I'd be slightly confused but I would be unequivocally happier with that settlement than the current one. While you could probably save a bit of money on the chocolate cakes, it would be much smaller than any of the other amounts in the case, and saving that money wouldn't have any real impact on the settlement actually doing what it needed to do.
      - zamadatix 7y ago
        Spending nearly $80,000,000.00 on lawyers didn't seem to explain to the court or FTC that the settlement should have been higher than mere dollars per person so I'm not sure how spending e.g. $800,000,000.00 on lawyers is supposed to result in anything beyond even less making it out to actual compensation. It's not like there was some busy public defender that didn't have time to think "gee, these people deserve more than a couple bucks and the company is probably going to make money off this 'fine' once the yearly renewal kicks in for those that opted for the coverage how can we argue a stronger deal" there was a high end team that made bank on a deal they knew they were the only ones making real money on regardless of what the deal was.
        geofft 7y ago
        I don't disagree about the part that lawyers enriched ourselves, but like the librarians eating cake in Tallahassee, I don't really care about that, personally. I do disagree with the part about spending $800M on lawyers - if that came out of Equifax's own pocket, that would be ten times more effective at B than spending $80M. If you made them spend $8B on lawyers, Equifax might well shut down, and scare the other credit reporting agencies into behaving. That is valuable to me. I'll be honest, as a victim, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with $125, either. I expect most people will spend it on themselves, but even spending it on credit monitoring doesn't actually fix the problem, it just makes the problem a little less bad, maybe, at the cost of enriching other companies that depend on this ecosystem of profiting off other people's data. I would genuinely prefer a settlement that cost Equifax $800M and got me nothing to one that cost $80M and got me $125.
        zamadatix 7y ago
        The lawyer pool isn't "in addition to" it comes "out of" the settlement amount that was already decided previously. I.e. the difference between 80 million and 800 million in lawyer fees is exactly 720 million that was supposed to have gone to compensation going to the lawyers instead.
        7y ago
  - cobookman 7y ago
    Revenue isn't the same as profit. " Net income attributable to Equifax of $299.8 million was down 49 percent compared to the full year 2017. " https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fourth-quarter-2018-results-300799253.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fo...
    - geofft 7y ago
      How much of their expenses are payroll, and in particular, executive payroll?
      - mikekchar 7y ago
        https://www1.salary.com/EQUIFAX-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/EQUIFAX-INC-Executive-Salaries.html Apparently the CEO got $20 million in salary. Edit: The more relevant number is the $6 million the CTO got! Man I suck: At least the Chief Information Security Officer got less than $4 million.
- patrickyeon 7y ago
  "2% of the shortfall", which would mean "2% of the 119$ less than the 125$ I could've been getting".
- x2f10 7y ago
  >80 million is quite a lot for them... Equifax should pay damages related to the severity of the breach not to the size of their bank account.
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    "Them", in this case, would be the lawyers.
dannyw 7y ago
Credit monitoring, * offered by Equifax *, should not be legitimate restitution. It’s like Apple’s MacBooks blowing up and a judge ruling Apple can give iCloud storage as compensation.
- koolba 7y ago
  You mean like the Zappos settlement where the restitution for the victims of the data breach was a 10% off coupon to Zappos? Which also lets them spam all their old customers who do not otherwise receive promotional emails from them.
  - harryh 7y ago
    I got like 3 of these emails from zappos. At some level you just have to laugh that they're advertising a court enforced penalty.
  - tylermac1 7y ago
    A 10% off coupon that I not only received a few days ago, but has to be used before Jan 1, 2020. Just a middle finger to the people who's data they were irresponsible with.
  - troydavis 7y ago
    This will continue until data protection legislation passes in the US. That’s the only way consumers will have any recourse. Here’s EPIC’s summary of the legislation options: https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/ https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/
    - Thriptic 7y ago
      This is the correct answer. The problem isn't how the class action suit was orchestrated; the problem is that class action is the only plausible and scalable form of justice currently available. Severe automatic penalties of X dollars per account lost and / or criminal liability for executives similar to SOX is what we need to deter these mistakes.
  - deleted 7y ago
okcando 7y ago
What I find especially bothersome is that their resolution has, in practice, only cost their victims more. Because the time needed to fill out that form and provide the documents will have been worth more than the payout, if one ever comes, for just about anyone who bothered to do it. Not at all satisfactory.
- rhizome 7y ago
  It's expensive to make big companies pay for their misdeeds.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  There would be no settlement at all without lawyers taking the case on contingency and fronting the costs.
  - cma 7y ago
    No settlement would be better since filling out the forms costs more than $6 in time.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      The settlement is meant to be punitive, not necessarily amount to a windfall for you. It's not terribly easy in a case like this to even prove damages. And no, it wouldn't be better to let them off the hook completely. I'm not saying this settlement is _at all_ satisfying, but c'mon.
      - Retric 7y ago
        The settlement is also political cover to avoid dealing with this problem. Without that some more meaningful change could have happened.
        EpicEng 7y ago
        I do disagree with you.
deogeo 7y ago
> This headline is dishonest. All part of the push to make class-action lawsuits economically unviable. When it's not worth it for any lawyer, the corporations will be free to defraud everyone for small amounts.
bradleyjg 7y ago
If the lawyers think the credit monitoring is so great they should take their fees in transferable credit monitoring coupons.
trianglem 7y ago
Your numbers are incorrect. A handful of attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution.
- geofft 7y ago
  The claim is "2% of the shortfall" (the amount of money that would be needed to get $125 instead of $6 to everyone in the settlement), not "2% of the settlement amount." Yes, the attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution. The resolution is so tiny that 20% of tiny is also tiny. The article title is highly misleading.

chrisan 7y ago

Where are you getting 2% from? The 77.5 is roughly 20% of the settlement fund Or if you want to include the crap credit monitoring it is 11% of the total 700 In either case no one will be getting near 125 but still 80 million is quite a lot for them...

tomnipotent 7y ago
> 80 million is quite a lot for them Against $3.5bln in 2019 revenues? That's not really a lot at all.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Why are you comparing how much the lawyers get to Equifax revenue?
  - geofft 7y ago
    Because the point of the settlement, in theory, is A) for Equifax to be sufficiently disincentivized from being careless again B) restitution for victims. In my opinion as a victim, amount of the settlement (paid to lawyers or otherwise) is too small to accomplish A, and the amount paid to lawyers, if redirected to victims, is still too small to accomplish B. These are the only things that feel relevant to compare the amount to. If the two sides negotiated a settlement that involved a serious change of business practices at Equifax, a significant payout to meaningfully compensate victims, and a chocolate cake for every retired librarian in Tallahassee, I'd be slightly confused but I would be unequivocally happier with that settlement than the current one. While you could probably save a bit of money on the chocolate cakes, it would be much smaller than any of the other amounts in the case, and saving that money wouldn't have any real impact on the settlement actually doing what it needed to do.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Spending nearly $80,000,000.00 on lawyers didn't seem to explain to the court or FTC that the settlement should have been higher than mere dollars per person so I'm not sure how spending e.g. $800,000,000.00 on lawyers is supposed to result in anything beyond even less making it out to actual compensation. It's not like there was some busy public defender that didn't have time to think "gee, these people deserve more than a couple bucks and the company is probably going to make money off this 'fine' once the yearly renewal kicks in for those that opted for the coverage how can we argue a stronger deal" there was a high end team that made bank on a deal they knew they were the only ones making real money on regardless of what the deal was.
      - geofft 7y ago
        I don't disagree about the part that lawyers enriched ourselves, but like the librarians eating cake in Tallahassee, I don't really care about that, personally. I do disagree with the part about spending $800M on lawyers - if that came out of Equifax's own pocket, that would be ten times more effective at B than spending $80M. If you made them spend $8B on lawyers, Equifax might well shut down, and scare the other credit reporting agencies into behaving. That is valuable to me. I'll be honest, as a victim, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with $125, either. I expect most people will spend it on themselves, but even spending it on credit monitoring doesn't actually fix the problem, it just makes the problem a little less bad, maybe, at the cost of enriching other companies that depend on this ecosystem of profiting off other people's data. I would genuinely prefer a settlement that cost Equifax $800M and got me nothing to one that cost $80M and got me $125.
        zamadatix 7y ago
        The lawyer pool isn't "in addition to" it comes "out of" the settlement amount that was already decided previously. I.e. the difference between 80 million and 800 million in lawyer fees is exactly 720 million that was supposed to have gone to compensation going to the lawyers instead.
        7y ago
- cobookman 7y ago
  Revenue isn't the same as profit. " Net income attributable to Equifax of $299.8 million was down 49 percent compared to the full year 2017. " https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fourth-quarter-2018-results-300799253.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equifax-releases-fo...
  - geofft 7y ago
    How much of their expenses are payroll, and in particular, executive payroll?
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      https://www1.salary.com/EQUIFAX-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/EQUIFAX-INC-Executive-Salaries.html Apparently the CEO got $20 million in salary. Edit: The more relevant number is the $6 million the CTO got! Man I suck: At least the Chief Information Security Officer got less than $4 million.
patrickyeon 7y ago
"2% of the shortfall", which would mean "2% of the 119$ less than the 125$ I could've been getting".
x2f10 7y ago
>80 million is quite a lot for them... Equifax should pay damages related to the severity of the breach not to the size of their bank account.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  "Them", in this case, would be the lawyers.

dannyw 7y ago

Credit monitoring, * offered by Equifax *, should not be legitimate restitution. It’s like Apple’s MacBooks blowing up and a judge ruling Apple can give iCloud storage as compensation.

koolba 7y ago
You mean like the Zappos settlement where the restitution for the victims of the data breach was a 10% off coupon to Zappos? Which also lets them spam all their old customers who do not otherwise receive promotional emails from them.
- harryh 7y ago
  I got like 3 of these emails from zappos. At some level you just have to laugh that they're advertising a court enforced penalty.
- tylermac1 7y ago
  A 10% off coupon that I not only received a few days ago, but has to be used before Jan 1, 2020. Just a middle finger to the people who's data they were irresponsible with.
- troydavis 7y ago
  This will continue until data protection legislation passes in the US. That’s the only way consumers will have any recourse. Here’s EPIC’s summary of the legislation options: https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/ https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/
  - Thriptic 7y ago
    This is the correct answer. The problem isn't how the class action suit was orchestrated; the problem is that class action is the only plausible and scalable form of justice currently available. Severe automatic penalties of X dollars per account lost and / or criminal liability for executives similar to SOX is what we need to deter these mistakes.
- deleted 7y ago

okcando 7y ago

What I find especially bothersome is that their resolution has, in practice, only cost their victims more. Because the time needed to fill out that form and provide the documents will have been worth more than the payout, if one ever comes, for just about anyone who bothered to do it. Not at all satisfactory.

rhizome 7y ago
It's expensive to make big companies pay for their misdeeds.
EpicEng 7y ago
There would be no settlement at all without lawyers taking the case on contingency and fronting the costs.
- cma 7y ago
  No settlement would be better since filling out the forms costs more than $6 in time.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    The settlement is meant to be punitive, not necessarily amount to a windfall for you. It's not terribly easy in a case like this to even prove damages. And no, it wouldn't be better to let them off the hook completely. I'm not saying this settlement is _at all_ satisfying, but c'mon.
    - Retric 7y ago
      The settlement is also political cover to avoid dealing with this problem. Without that some more meaningful change could have happened.
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        I do disagree with you.

deogeo 7y ago

> This headline is dishonest. All part of the push to make class-action lawsuits economically unviable. When it's not worth it for any lawyer, the corporations will be free to defraud everyone for small amounts.

bradleyjg 7y ago

If the lawyers think the credit monitoring is so great they should take their fees in transferable credit monitoring coupons.

trianglem 7y ago

Your numbers are incorrect. A handful of attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution.

geofft 7y ago
The claim is "2% of the shortfall" (the amount of money that would be needed to get $125 instead of $6 to everyone in the settlement), not "2% of the settlement amount." Yes, the attorneys are taking 20% of the resolution. The resolution is so tiny that 20% of tiny is also tiny. The article title is highly misleading.