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Comment by pushedx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to submit a claim simply out of pity for Patreon here.

Almost every website around ~2013 sent heaps of information to Facebook just by embedding the like button in their page, and often did so unknowingly.

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Nerd sites were screaming about it, extensions existed to remove them, for the reasons you say. The web devs generally knew this was an issue but the clicks were more important. I don't pity them.

Ignorance is no excuse. Don't dump loads of third-party JS onto your site without understanding what it does. That's negligence.

If Facebook misrepresented what the code (or whatever) Patreon included was going to do, sure, ok, fair. But then in that case Facebook should be the target of the suit. (Unclear who should sue whom, though... users sue Patreon and Patreon sues Facebook? Users sue Facebook directly?)

> JS onto your site without understanding what it does. That's negligence

Everybody understood what it did. It was legal at the time. Then it was made illegal. The lawsuit literally retroactively includes the period in which it was legal.

Seems that the lawsuit is predicated on the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act and that the plaintiffs are arguing it was never legal.

Are there any cases litigated to trial on this? This case avoids trial by settling, for better or worse.

Usually it doesn't matter if you submit a claim or not. The company receives the same fine. It's just that the number of slices increases.

I would read the fine print. One settlement I was a part of said “if you don’t accept the money… it goes straight to the government!”

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