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890 College Students Sue Google Over Email Scanning (santacruzsentinel.com)
An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bay Area Newsgroup: Legal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by 890 U.S. college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent...making the same claim: that Google's Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes.... The suit by 710 students alleged that until April 2015, Google denied it was scanning students' emails for advertising purposes and misled schools into believing the emails were private.
The students' lawyers say each student is seeking a maximum of $10,000, while the U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told the lawyer that "Our clerk's office is really unhappy you are circumventing our [$400 per case] filing fees by adding 710 cases under one case number."
The students' lawyers say each student is seeking a maximum of $10,000, while the U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told the lawyer that "Our clerk's office is really unhappy you are circumventing our [$400 per case] filing fees by adding 710 cases under one case number."
And a previous lawsuit, in 2013, alleged that Google was illegally scanning students' emails, mirroring the Berkeley students' claims.
But the earlier case -- which was filed in the same federal court -- was framed differently, as a class-action suit on behalf of virtually all users of Google's Apps for Education. It ended in 2014, when a federal judge declined to certify the class, ruling that -- because each school is responsible for its own privacy explanations and disclosures -- users at some universities might have consented to the scanning of their emails.
I haven't looked into the legal details of the previous case, but this seems again like an abuse of the court systems of late to refuse to certify class action suits for random reasons. If the WaPo description is accurate, what difference does it make in a lawsuit against Google what the universities told their students in privacy disclosures, etc.? The only facts should be what Google claimed, either to the public directly or to administration folks at these universities, about what their email should be used for. On the face of it, this seems a rather silly reason to disqualify a class action. (That is, unless they have proof that some students involved had actually signed a waiver from their university saying, "As a student here, you consent to having your email used by Google for commercial purposes." It seems really unlikely any university would ever make a student sign such a waiver, since it would probably be considered a significant FERPA violation.)
Anyhow, the present suit is restricted to one college, because Berkeley explicitly told students that their email wouldn't be scanned for advertising purposes. Again -- all of this seems irrelevant to a lawsuit against Google. If Google told university administrators that they WOULD scan email, and the university told students it WOULD NOT scan email, then the students should suing Berkeley instead of Google.
But if the situation was misrepresented both to the university AND to the students, and the students all were harmed in a similar fashion by the exact same mechanism, I can't see how it makes sense to force them all try separate cases here.
Please. Would you want to bother going through the legal process if you were to get nothing out of it while your government reaped the rewards and then wasted it on something stupid?
That would be like the bully at school stealing your lunch, so the school principal makes the parents buy you a new one but the principal gets to eat it.
No, it wouldn't. You would get reparations for the actual damages, which is your incentive. But not a smidgeon more. It would be like forcing the bully's parents to compensate you for every lunch that was stolen, plus an additional fine that neither you nor the headmaster gets[*], but is intended to make other potential school bullies think twice before stealing someone's lunch.
[*]: Typically, punitive fines go into trusts that allows courts to pay out actual damages to the grievants even when the ones who should pay are insolvent. Any excess would go to the government as a whole, just like taxes and other federal fines. In your example, it means that you would still be reimbursed your stolen lunches even if the bully's parents were destitute.