Lawyers! win! millions! in! bonkers! Yahoo! email! snooping! case!

What a waste.

All that time studying law that they could have put to good use doing, y'know, lawyer shit.

Instead, they've achieved nowt meaningful other than a payout for themselves.

Conscience? What conscience?

What is the payout per hour? That would be a more interesting measure. And yes, the legal system in the US is weird.

Nobody in California is going to get fined for scanning data to target advertising

Silly Valley would implode otherwise.

Ransom?

I assume that Yahoo! will be paying them in Bitcoin, the normal payment method for ransomware.

Bah!

Eh?

I should start by declaring that I am a lawyer.

The bad press lawyers get obviously irritates me because all the people who complain about lawyers are the ones instructing us and hoping to get a big payout. So, clean up your own act first and don't hide behind the lawyers.

Yes, I hate ambulance chasers because they give me and my profession a bad name but it is Joe Public who ultimately instructs those lawyers.

Getting to the real point of my reply, I think most of you don't appreciate how the US system works. In the EU we are accustomed to a heavily regulated environment where state organisations undertake the bulk of the enforcement. That is of course very dependent on those organisations performing their functions rapidly and efficiency. Sadly that is not often the case. Our own ICO in the UK is a toothless organisation that places the interests of big business ahead of civil liberties and individual rights, for example. Self-regulation by industry? Nope, rarely works.

In the US the legal profession acts as the enforcement agency. Yes, there are regulators in the US but the primary level of enforcement is undertaken by lawyers. That is how their system has evolved.

So, in this case the class action has resulted in a success in so far as forcing Yahoo to comply with the law. The system has worked as designed and, yes, the lawyers have been paid handsomely. That's what happens when you leave enforcement to businesses who want to make a return on their "investment". Whether or not $4m is justified I can't say, but you can't knock the lawye if that is what the system is.

Ultimately if the US doesn't want lawyer-led enforcement then it needs to spend billions on putting together a range of regulators and enabling laws. The billions figure I have plucked out of the air and I of course don't know what it would cost, but it would have to be of that order.

Absolutely, hammer lawyers who deliver bad services or who over charge for work done; but please also take some collective personal responsibility for your enabling participation in the process (a general comment because I'm sure nobody who reads The Register has ever responded to a 'have you been recently injured' call but strangely some must have because they still keep calling!).

if we had 'rule of law' all those involved would be in jail

Is there going to be another class action to stop them scanning data at rest?

I have to admire the comment that it's so complicated not scanning messages that having put a mechanism in place to not scan them it would be too complicated to start scanning again. Nice one.

bad precedent

Not sure if they have precedent in US law, but anyway...

This is a another case of simplifying technical concepts into non-technical terms that are not relevant.

Data in transit or at rest is a term you can apply to a paper letter, but digital data can really be in transit AND at rest at the same time. Which is it is still irrelevant to whether or not someone is scanning my emails... they are or they are not.

UK: Internet Connection Records - still no clear definition for how a 60s telephony concept can be crowbar'd into modern digital networking theory.