Manifestations of a tech geek

Cerebral Manifest

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Important Information about Google Buzz Class Action Settlement

I was forwarded an email recently with the subject line “Important Information about Google Buzz Class Action Settlement”. At first I thought it could be a hoax, after annalyzing the headers it seemed legit enough, atleast it seems like someone managed to either spoof google.com or hacked into it to send spam. Seems like a lot of trouble for quite a harmless email.
The email talks about how Google want’s to settle with every American who uses Google and was possibly affected by Google Buzz lack of privacy and auto subscription when it first launched. After some googling it seems like the email is Legit (see links below) 

The email also includes the following statement:
This mandatory announcement was sent to all Gmail users in the United States as part of a legal settlement and was authorized by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
That just seems wack. I am not aware if this has ever been done before! A class action lawsuit to be settled via email and an ugly website. Yes they point you to a website that seems kind of ugly for Google’s standards, and makes you think the whole thing is fake (link below).

So I guess Google is setting a precedent here in settling lawsuits, this is kind of cool. i am glad I got to know about this although I am up in Canada. I wonder why Google didn’t care to settle with everyone and not just people that have United States set in their Google profiles? Do they not care about everyone else just because they probably wont be able to sue them?

Interesting …

References:

Edit: It seems the ugly website is no google’s fault, its their lawyers at http://www.gcginc.com/ that seem to have set it up. The lawyer firm’s website is equally ugly. But hey good lawyers probably have ugly websites :p

    I was forwarded an email recently with the subject line “Important Information about Google Buzz Class Action Settlement”. At first I thought it could be a hoax, after annalyzing the headers it seemed legit enough, atleast it seems like someone ma…

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