Internet privacy lawsuits, once all the rage, fizzle out

A few years ago, Internet privacy lawsuits were getting filed left and right in courts, most of them seeking to become class action cases. That stream appears to have dried up, according to a report in The Recorder, a San Francisco legal newspaper. The newspaper measured the trend by counting privacy lawsuits filed in the Northern District of California, where either Apple, Google, or Facebook was named as a defendant. It found 29 such federal lawsuits were filed in 2010, 20 in 2011, and 30 in 2013. But in 2014, only four lawsuits were filed. In 2015, only one privacy lawsuit has been filed so far (against Facebook).

"There have been few big pay days and some signs that mainstream plaintiffs firms are losing interest," writes reporter Ross Todd. Some of those few pay days: Facebook wrote a check for $20 million to settle a case over its "sponsored stories," which used users' images without their permission. The plaintiffs' lawyers received about $4.7 million of that. comScore paid $14 million in a case where plaintiffs claimed they were tricked by comScore into installing analytics software that collected a "terrifying" amount of data. Plaintiffs' lawyers were awarded $4.7 million in that case as well.