14 DAY TRIAL // The class action lawsuit brought against Yahoo! by multiple non-users has been resolved, and if the judge approves the current settlement proposal, all of the damages will go to the plaintiffs' lawyers, with zero dollars for users, The Recorder reports.
When a user signs up to use Yahoo! Mail, they sign a privacy agreement and terms of service. Yahoo! non-users are the people that send or receive emails to / from Yahoo! email addresses, to whom these terms of service do not apply.
These users felt their privacy was intruded when Yahoo scanned their emails to gather data for its ad service, and in 2013 sued the company in multiple separate instances that were later unified in a class action lawsuit.
Users won't get any settlement money
Now, two years after the case started, Yahoo! and the class action plaintiffs seem to have reached an agreement, one that allows the plaintiffs to ask for damages of up to $4 million / €3.7 million, which will all go to their lawyers as litigation fees.
According to the settlement's technical terms, besides agreeing to cover the plaintiffs' lawyer fees, Yahoo! will also change the way it scans emails, but will not drop this operation.
Prior to the settlement, Yahoo! scanned all incoming and outgoing emails as soon as they arrived on its servers or the user initiated a Send command.
After the settlement is approved by the judge, Yahoo! will only scan incoming emails after the user has opened the email, and only after an outgoing email was added to the Sent folder.
Settlement's technical side is ridiculous
The technical details are ridiculous since, for incoming emails, users have only delayed an unavoidable operation, while for outgoing emails, this operation was only delayed by a few milliseconds.
The lawsuit settlement seems to be a way for Yahoo! to legalize the email scanning procedures it has in place in the US. In Britain, because of local laws, the company had to completely drop this process.
On the other hand, for the plaintiffs, the settlement is also an easy way out of paying mounting attorney fees, for a lawsuit they didn't have any clear chances of winning. Just like Yahoo!, Google was also accused in 2013 of the same thing, and in the end, it got away without having to stop its email scanning procedures.
The next class action lawsuit we need to keep an eye on from now on is the one brought against Twitter this fall, the company being accused of inserting t.co short URLs in links in private messages, and by doing so, intruding on a user's private conversations.