It was definitely the path that required the least amount of effort from them and they happily pocketed near 50% of the settlement.

Deleted replied to the wrong comment.

As far as I’m aware the lawyers didn’t consult with the class-action members, or at the very least I was never asked if we should accept the settlement or not, the lawyers just accepted. Alternatively you could opt out of the settlement if you wanted, which is what I chose to do, mostly because the settlement amount was far too low, in my opinion, and they required signing and accepting an NDA which I was not willing to do.

I was originally part of this class-action. When the lawyers decided to settle I refused to accept the settlement, purely because Google admitted no fault and also required us to agree that we couldn’t ever sue over the issue again in the future even if new evidence came to light. The dollar amount they offered wasn’t tiny (it wasn’t large by any means either), but I felt it was in no way a valid amount for what was being claimed. Not to mention the lawyers were taking close to or maybe more than half of the settlement money, which I find offensive considering they decided to settle the case and allow Google to wash their hands of the matter. Luckily I reserved my right to sue again in the future, but I’d either have to go at it alone or try to form a new class-action suite. I’m still incredibly disappointed that the lawyers handling the case backed down and took the settlement, I would have rather lost the case and discovered the truth than take a pittance and let Google off.

Edit: I almost forgot, the most aggregious requirement to the settlement was the non-disclosure agreement that you had to accept which meant you couldn’t say anything at all about the settlement or the case if you took the money. It also appeared to me that they were trying to apply the non-disclosure even if you didn’t take the settlement, which I don’t know how you can be held to a NDA if you haven’t signed and accepted the NDA. The whole thing smelled of bullshit to me.

Most of the ones I’ve been a part of I’ve had to provide information that proves that I was negatively affected, but there have been a couple that I didn’t have to do that. Generally I think the ones where you have to provide proof lean towards being higher in the amount of money you get, but that’s only my personal experience.

I’ve been part of a class action suite that netted me several hundred dollars, but it was a rarity, most others I’ve participated in ended up with me receiving between $1-20.

I enjoy k, but I never go for k-holing, I like small amounts every so often. I suppose I’d liken it to preferring to get a buzz from alcohol vs getting really drunk. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever k-holed before and I don’t really have any pull towards wanting to do it either.

Pretty easy to disable the location app permission or set it to ask every time. Firefox hasn’t asked me to enable it since turning it off.

Weirdly enough, I like buying movies to encourage people to keep making the kinds of movies I enjoy watching. I have some physical media, but often times you can’t find 4k versions of movies on physical media.

Also, I tend to buy digital and don’t watch subscription services much.

On the rare occasion I want to stream movies while on my PC at 1080p, because most online movie services will only stream 1080p to Edge. Some times Chrome will be allowed to stream 1080p but it’s pretty hit or miss in my experience. On another note, basically no streaming services will stream movies to you in 4k on a PC, I’ve also found most streaming apps on my phone won’t give me 4k either, you can only really get 4k streaming to a smart TV… it’s pretty ridiculous.

There is such thing as loose leaf tea where you don’t use tea bags when brewing.

After a bit further reading of the article it looks like they also found that certain types of tea bags helped.

They should probably move that information to the top so it at least primes readers ahead of time. Either way, I still feel like this system they are defining has to have some sort of centralized verification agency/group and I don’t really know how you can do that and not potentially be open for abuse or corruption. Alternatively, I also don’t know how you can verifiy an individual is who they say they are and aren’t creating fake/bot accounts in a decentralized manner either, these are very hard problems to solve and I don’t know if this paper touches on any ideas as to how to solve them, but it would be interesting to hear from the author on those topics.

Again, interesting read and thanks for sharing it, I think it’s important for people to be thinking about how to approach problems like this in a digital age sooner rather than later.

Maybe it’s because I couldn’t get through reading all of this, but my initial skimming leads me to believe this would be hard to fully protect against abuse. It also feels like that at least in the beginning there would be a lot of centralized power and that doesn’t feel great to me.

There are also a lot of grammar mistakes that made it hard for me to read, I’m admittedly not a great writer, but it was causing me to stumble while reading and made me question if this paper had even been edited or proofread by anyone.

All that said, it’s definitely an interesting thought experiment.

Calling the office of the Attorney General in your state would be a good place to start. Also contacting the people in your state’s houses of Congress as well as the ones at the federal level.

Hoping to see my state added to the list, they’ve been filling suits on a lot of other issues as well, but sometimes seem to be a little delayed.

Can we stop referring to him as becoming a king? Let’s call it what it truly is that he’s trying to become, a dictator.

Exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my original comment.

It’s like mob tactics, once you pay for protection they’ll just keep coming back asking for more until you’re bled dry, then they’ll dispose of you.

Cool, can we make the divest from American game studios now?

I doubt they’ll go hungry for at least 4 years.