how the fuck are those legal? frankly more disturbing to me than the AI training one, which I find less objectionable than selling people's attention to advertisers
The US doesn't have loser pays and has some of the most expensive litigation in the world, which has created all kinds of problems. Someone can file a lawsuit against you knowing that they're unlikely to win, but in so doing they could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars for lawyers, so why don't you just go ahead and settle for tens of thousands of dollars? It will cost you less to settle than to win in court.
This flaw was made to scale by class action lawsuits, which more than any other should be loser pays, because there is little question that thousands of people who have each been harmed to the tune of $100 could each front $10 for a meritorious lawsuit. But instead you get opportunistic lawyers signing up anyone they can find for questionable claims, so they can reach a settlement where the plaintiffs each get $7 -- or a $7 gift certificate -- and the lawyers get millions.
This was rightly regarded as a problem but the lawyers had enough political power to prevent a good solution, so what we got instead was to make it easier to force binding arbitration and opt out of class action suits.
IANAL. According to [1] they are legal per Supreme Court precedent, but it also says:
"Contract formation is increasingly scrutinised. Following Concepcion and its progeny, some courts have focused on issues of contract formation to determine whether the consumer in fact agreed to arbitration and the class action waiver. This inquiry is largely confined to online transactions, where a consumer is deemed to have consented to arbitration by using the business's website to purchase goods or services. These contracts fall within the rubric of "clickwrap," "browsewrap," or "webwrap" agreements and their enforceability is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to note that the courts will refuse to enforce class action waivers and arbitration agreements in such agreements when the arbitration provisions were insufficiently conspicuous to ensure the consumer objectively agreed to their terms."
The article also mentions that non-negotiable consumer contracts are viewed with more suspicion by some courts.
Class action lawsuits suck for victims. The only people it’s good for are lawyers, who become fabulously wealthy, while the victims get a check for two dollars in the mail.
That backfired on them when all the Twitter employees they fired sued them in individual lawsuits, so now they have to do the same discovery process and everything else over and over for each case. Lol. That only backfired because enough individuals that had the means to bring a full suit at the same time though. Unlikely to happen normally.
