14 DAY TRIAL // We may never know how much Google Buzz's failed launch ended costing the company, in terms of potential revenue, but we known exactly what it took to settle a lawsuit filed against it on the matter, $8.5 million.
The company has now ended a lawsuit surrounding the Google Buzz privacy fiasco. $8.5 million is nothing to a company doing $25 billion a year in revenue, but it's a lot of money for most people.
But, guess what, the ones actually filing the lawsuit are getting nowhere near as much. In fact, according to the court papers, each of the seven plaintiffs will get no more than $2,500.
It makes sense, the penalty has to be proportional to the actual damage done which, the judge decided, wasn't very big.
Google Buzz launched to a lot of hype. One of the most touted features, at launch, was the fact that it automatically created a social graph for you, based on your Gmail contacts.
The problem was, most people wanted their Gmail contacts kept private and, in some cases, for very good reasons. Google scrambled to fix the problem and made the necessary changes within days. Later it completely overhauled the system, fixing many of the issues.
It was clearly a bad decision from Google and the settlement serves as reminder that privacy issues are important.
And it only fair that the plaintiffs don't get rich just because Google may have exposed the people they emailed a lot. But, perhaps, neither should the lawyers.
Yet, 30 percent of the $8.5 million goes straight to the lawyers. Even with all the lawsuit expenses, that's still a tidy profit. You could argue of course that, without the monetary incentives, lawyers would be standing up for the 'little guy.'
The rest of the sum will go to a number of, as of yet unspecified, Internet privacy groups.