Class action lawsuits are all the rage in the US

It begins with an email landing in my inbox bearing some deeply ominous variation of: COURT-ORDERED NOTICE OF CLASS ACTION.

Burdened by my ‘small-farmer-west-of-Ireland-Catholic-guilt’, my instinctive reaction was always mild panic. Had I committed tax fraud? Was I being deported? Had somebody in Donald Trump’s FBI discovered my less than presidentially-supportive Substack?

Once I put my clothes back on I would actually read the damn thing and assume it was some nefarious hacker from Nigeria, North Korea or Crossmolina, enticing me to enter my personal details via some random weblink.

But after paranoid-googling each one, the penny eventually dropped that in America these legal notices arrive with the same regularity as supermarket coupons and with almost the same value.

So, if like me you filled your car with gas, owned an iPhone, streamed television, subscribed to a newspaper, used Siri, held a brokerage account, or merely existed online for longer than 20 minutes, chances are some American corporation has wronged you in a sufficiently industrial fashion to involve federal judges, armies of lawyers and settlement administrators operating out of some anonymous office park in Oregon.

And eventually, if fortune smiles upon you, a check, for $17.04, arrives in the mail.

Over the years, I somehow became involved in lawsuits concerning defective Apple keyboards, Siri secretly listening to private conversations, misleading iPhone storage capacity, unrequested newspaper subscription renewals, streaming privacy violations, brokerage monopolies and even Google allegedly tracking smartphone users without consent. All I was completely oblivious to, and to be honest, still pretty much am.

At one point, I received a cheque connected to a lawsuit alleging fuel price manipulation in California. There is something profoundly funny about the sheer seriousness surrounding it all. The envelope looked like it held nuclear launch codes while the paperwork referred solemnly to federal litigation and settlement administrators. However, the payment of $21.65 would barely buy a sandwich and a bottle of water in Whole Foods not to mind a tank of petrol.

Another time, I received compensation from the New York Times because of issues surrounding automatic subscription renewals. Again, the amount was roughly equivalent to the price of parking for 20 minutes outside Trader Joe’s.

Then came Siri.

This one genuinely made me laugh. I was informed I could be entitled to compensation because Apple’s voice assistant may have accidentally activated during private conversations. In order to participate, one had to attest “under penalty of perjury” that Siri had activated unintentionally on Apple devices during confidential discussions. Eventually, after this grand constitutional drama had played itself out across the American legal system, I received the princely sum of $40.10.

Enough perhaps for a lick of a single chocolate strawberry in Erewhon. Perhaps.

The Apple lawsuits alone seemed endless. At one stage I was informed that my MacBook keyboard may have been defective because of something called the “butterfly keyboard mechanism”. Another notice explained I could be included in litigation because Apple had allegedly misled consumers over the storage capacity of sixteen-gigabyte iPhones and iPads.

That case, in particular, felt magnificently American. Somewhere in California, federal courts were dedicating serious legal resources to the question of whether consumers had been psychologically damaged because roughly three of their sixteen-gigabyte phones were already occupied by the operating system.

The deeper I sank into this world, the more surreal it became.

At one point, I received formal notice that Google may have continued tracking users’ mobile app activity even after people had explicitly turned tracking settings off or “paused” them. The notice read like something from a dystopian novel crossed with a toaster instruction manual. There were references to “intrusion upon seclusion”, software development kits, mobile operating systems and federal court rulings.

The most American part came later.

A subsequent notice informed class members that a jury had awarded over $425 million in damages against Google. The lawyers then sought 33% of the judgment, plus costs and interest. Because, that in the end is the whole point.

Technology companies harvest personal data at planetary scale, lawyers battle one another for years in federal court, juries award hundreds of millions of dollars and somewhere at the very end of this enormous machinery, ordinary people like myself receive enough compensation to maybe buy lunch at In-N-Out Burger. Maybe.

There was also the surreal Schwab lawsuit which alleged that mergers between brokerage firms reduced market competition and negatively affected investors, involving antitrust law, federal litigation, major financial institutions and the fact that rain is wet. However, this time I was informed that “Settlement Class Members will not receive a payment” while having the right to opt-out of the class action and organise their own legal case. So, I rejoiced in the knowledge of having done my (unpaid) part in protecting American capitalism from… American capitalism.

In reality, these lawsuits exist because corporations really do behave outrageously at astonishing scale. Without our GDPR legislative protections, the modern American economy runs on surveillance, subscriptions, data harvesting, algorithmic manipulation, hidden fees and terms and conditions nobody reads.

The truly striking thing is not that these lawsuits exist but that Americans have become accustomed to them.

Data breaches happen so frequently now that people barely react anymore. One company connected to my retirement account informed me that hackers may have accessed sensitive personal data but I should not be alarmed as they they had “negotiated with the unauthorized actor and received assurances that the files taken were deleted”. Because, how can you not trust the word of a capitalist hacker?

I remember rereading the sentence several times, struck by how casually it described what sounded remarkably like paying ransom to cybercriminals. Months later, I received another settlement cheque for roughly $152. So, that’s okay so.

This is America in miniature: corporate dysfunction managed through industrial-scale bureaucracy.

And truthfully, many of the lawsuits themselves seem more than a little ridiculous.

Some involve genuinely serious issues: hacked financial data, privacy breaches, anti-competitive behaviour. Others feel like the legal system disappearing into parody. Multi-year federal litigation over three missing gigabytes on an iPhone. Lawsuits over automatic newspaper renewals. Streaming services allegedly tracking viewing habits. Cases where millions of dollars in legal fees orbit around inconveniences most people barely noticed at the time.

At times, it feels less like justice and more like an enormous administrative machine converting modern annoyance into billable hours.

What struck me most was how routine it all became. Companies allegedly violate privacy on an enormous scale, lawyers descend, settlement administrators appear, emails are sent, tiny cheques arrive months or years later and the machine simply continues on unchanged.

Recent commentary in the American media increasingly suggests that class action lawsuits have become less a form of genuine accountability and more a substitute for effective regulation. Governments move slowly, regulators are often overwhelmed or politically constrained and giant corporations can end up treating settlements as simply another cost of doing business, to be written off against their tax-bill.

Consumers, meanwhile, receive symbolic compensation. My various settlement payments over several years would barely cover four Erewhon chocolate strawberries. Yet, considering I could not have cared less about the injustices underpinning the various monetary awards, four Erewhon chocolate strawberries is probably fair value.

The real winners, critics argue, are often the lawyers, consultants and administrative industries orbiting these lawsuits. As referenced earlier, one Google privacy case alone involved hundreds of millions of dollars in damages while lawyers sought roughly a third of the total judgment in fees and costs.

And yet the strangest part is how quickly one becomes accustomed to it all.

After enough years in Los Angeles, I stopped feeling shocked whenever another legal notice arrived informing me that my personal data, phone activity, pension records, streaming habits, or online behaviour may once again have been compromised. Instead, I would scan the email looking for the only detail that really mattered: How much am I getting this time?