I was a member of the class. After the settlement went through, I remember receiving a few large booklets in the mail from a law firm explaining the settlement and offering the opportunity to opt out.
After what seemed like a really long time - at least a year - I received a check for about $5000, which I had to pay taxes on, so it ended up being around $3000 net. I had left the company by that time, but still owned a substantial amount of stock, so I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up losing more from the negative impact on the stock price than I got in the settlement.
The people who really came out ahead in this were the lawyers, who took something like 25% of the settlement for themselves.
Not a member of that class but one of the things that happened as a result of these revelations was that everyone at Google got a large raise (much larger than typical annual raises) and a substantial one-time cash bonus which appeared to be, during the announcement, just Eric being Uncle Moneybags but just after the all-hands we all found out the reason from the newspapers.
I got some stuff in the mail, and eventually two checks for the two phases. I think they were something like $1100 and $7000.
I was kind of annoyed because the initial settlement was apparently so embarrassing that the _judge_ rejected it, something like $330M on supposedly $3B in lost wages. So they went back and increased it to the $435M, still nowhere close to what it should have been. Of course at this point the lawyers' incentives and the class' incentives are not aligned at all, so that's how it ended.
After what seemed like a really long time - at least a year - I received a check for about $5000, which I had to pay taxes on, so it ended up being around $3000 net. I had left the company by that time, but still owned a substantial amount of stock, so I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up losing more from the negative impact on the stock price than I got in the settlement.
The people who really came out ahead in this were the lawyers, who took something like 25% of the settlement for themselves.