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Comment by ThunderSizzle | Hacker News Reader

Or a lawsuit go through where someone can win quite a bit from from data leaks. If each person affected sued and won 100k or so, or even 1k, AT&T would definitely be spending money on security.

But it appears $5 or credit monitoring from an agency that also gets hacked is sufficient for class action lawsuits.

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That requires people to be rich enough to sue. It takes a lot of money and time to sue. Almost no one has enough resources to do this. The courts are not an effective way to implement this policy. Unless you only want rich people to be able to get justice.

110M people impacted = class action

The lawyers work on contingency

Imagine the GDPR fine

Up to 4% of income. This is not the end of the world either.

showing damages is hard

Class action suits regularly end up getting you "$5" worth of credit monitoring from the exact company who lost your data. It's a joke. Class action suits as they exist today in the US are an abject failure of justice.

If they end up with the company having to pay anything, it is greater than fines imposed by regulatory agencies… who should be doing this job.

And rich people usually do deals off-court. You will pay me this and we are ok. Because its faster and both sides know they capabilities usually.

Most companies now include clauses that force arbitration and prevent you from using a class action lawsuit. This type of sidestepping of the public justice system should be outlawed, retroactively, with retroactive lawsuits (by extending the statute of limitations), retroactive fines, and retroactive jail time.

“12 months free credit monitoring with auto-renewal”.

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