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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one a little bit sickened that the multi-billion dollar lawsuit is to the [potential] benefit of investors, rather than the users who were harmed?

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If you (a user) can demonstrate actual harm done to you from the Cambridge Analytica scandal then you can sue too. But you were already giving your data freely to Facebook to sell you targeted ads, so you’re going to have an uphill battle in how getting targeted political ads from Cambridge derived analysis harmed you. Not in a sense like “the wrong person got elected so I was theoretically harmed” because I doubt you can make that work in court. But if maybe your wife saw the ads and thought you were voting for someone she didn’t like, then divorced you and took half of the company you founded, then maybe your argument has a chance (if you could prove it).

On the other hand, there was a way to attribute loss in stock price that happened when the news of the scandal broke. Investors have a clearer path to arguing that they were harmed, even though they are not guaranteed to win the case.

True.

Proving damages by externalities is very hard unfortunately.

For example I remember a case where foresters around here tried to sue coal companies for the acidified rain which killed a lot of pines and saplings and cost them a lot of money.

The courts denied any compensation because they should have known acid rain was a risk and they could not prove which sulphur compound molecules originated from which company. And I suppose courts would treat misuse of personal data the same.

The reality is that it's much easier to bring a lawsuit over damage done to shareholders (dropped stock value is measurable and easy to see, security fraud), than it is to bring a lawsuit over damage done to users (harm done to individual users is hard to measure).

It's a real shame damage to privacy isn't acknowledged as self-evident.

Of the 87 million or so individuals who were impacted[1], only 270,000 gave their consent[2]:

The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

What harmed users? They agreed to all of this when signing up

Nope.

> Cambridge Analytica later obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people’s friends — including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

- https://apnews.com/article/c8f615be9523421998b4fcc16374ff37

Users are dumb enough to agree to harm themselves. Intellectually honest libertarianism requires looking the resulting tragedies in the eye and saying “this sucks but government worse,” not raw denialism.

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