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by alaxhn 455 days ago
"If Meta disagrees with O'Carroll's claims then why settle"

Meta and most companies will settle lawsuits when they believe the rewards of continuing the lawsuit outweigh the cost of settling the lawsuit. There is no connection to whether they disagree or agree with the claim of the lawsuit.
1 comments
eek2121 455 days ago
You only got that half right, fyi. Companies will choose to settle if they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trial. If they suspect they will win, they will absolutely pursue, because they can counter-sue in many areas. Anything close to 50/50 or less, they will settle in a heartbeat. They may even have a winning case, only to realize they are up against a law firm that will rip them apart.
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alaxhn 454 days ago
"Companies will choose to settle if they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trial"

Companies will settle if the costs of going to trail outweigh the benefits like I said in my original comment. To clarify, the cost benefit analysis includes more than just money as things like reputation and precedent are important too. The reason for settling is sometimes because they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trail (meaning low potential benefit) but not always and this is not even the most common reason to settle. In the article being cited facebook is agreeing "to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight". This is an individual settlement and not a group settlement. Targeting ads at a single user has very low benefits for Facebook (tens to hundreds of dollars) which will not even pay for a single hour of a lawyer's time. It would be absurd for Facebook to counter sue Ms. O'Carrol and counter suits in general are quite rare.

To provide some approximate numbers:

  - ~90% of cases settle
  - ~1% of cases involve a counter suit
  - Facebook legal cost for in house counsel appears to be in the range of $250 per hour equivalent
  - Facebook average annual revenue per user in Europe is about $25
The full story here is that Ms. O'Carrol is a legal activist focused on Tech Surveillance (https://www.foxglove.org.uk/who-we-are/people/tanya-ocarroll...) and Facebook came up with a strategy to undermine her legal standing at minimal cost to themselves (if Facebook is not tracking O'Carrol personally for the purposes of serving ads then O'Carrol personally has no standing to sue). This is in effect a win for big tech but being spun by a PR machine as a win for data privacy.
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