Hacker News Reader

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a candidate for class action lawsuits against the hotel, the brand, and the sensor company?

Class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos. They take what should be many separate instances of fraud with unknown unknowns and tie them all off in one small garbage bag. Half the money goes to the attorneys and the other half is a token payment or even just funds a coupon to encourage doing more business with the perpetrator.

I'd really like to see some service that facilitates you opting out of a class action, and then comes in later representing you for your own individual case (at scale) based on the implicit admission of wrongdoing from the settlement plus documenting actual damages.

Was it necessary to make your point in a very snarky manner?

Edit: For context, the first sentence of the version I commented on was "You do realize that class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos, right?", which comes across as quite snarky. It was edited at some point.

Yes, I edited it out. You were right, and I figured it better for the conversation to just not start off with that phrasing. Sorry for not seeing a way to make that apparent while also not growing accidental complexity.

good luck with that lol

There was a big thing about this a few years ago -- companies didn't want class actions (too expensive in lawyers, primarily), so they forced binding arbitration agreements into their EULA. Then a big law firm filed thousands of binding arbitrations on behalf of what was basically the class. The company had to pay $1000's/arbitration in fees to the arbitration company, which also didn't have an incentive to reduce the number of arbitrations when the company tried to get out of it. Turned into an incentive to not put binding arbitration clauses in agreements...

They're a boom compared the the impossible ideal world where every instance is prosecuted separately, but barring the superhuman feat of getting thousands of individuals to show up to court, they are certainly far worse for corporations than any realistic alternate scenario.

One alternative scenario is for courts to start recognizing administrative runaround as actual damages. It sounds like there is a lot of back and forth to correct these fraudulent bills, so estimating maybe 4 days of 4 hours of paralegal-equivalent time ~ $1600. But then additional legal fees on top of that for having to press the matter, so ~$5000? Whereas a class action lawsuit would net like maybe $20 token payment to victims, so $40 cost to company. So perhaps only 1 out of 100 people who were wronged would have to actually sue to make it just as bad for the corpo. Never mind getting into things like treble damages as these corpos are deliberately committing these frauds.

One alternative is having consumer protection laws with teeth and state-sponsored consumer protection agencies pursuing lawsuits to enforce their boundaries. It works fairly well that way in some European countries.

Consumer protection laws with teeth? In the US?

I said realistic scenario.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com