It took almost a year. Lawyers and privacy advocates had been waiting since oral argument last October to find out whether the Ninth Circuit would uphold a Facebook privacy class action settlement that puts millions into a charity instead of giving money to plaintiffs.
In the meantime, judges as well as consumer and privacy groups had expressed increasing skepticism about the fairness of similar settlements that dole out millions to privacy groups but not individuals. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg, who had approved the deal in 2009, threw out a similar settlement also involving Facebook Inc. this past August.
