After having over 3 billion email accounts compromised between 2012-2016, Yahoo! seems to be finally paying up. The company, now owned by Verizon, agreed to a $117.5 million settlement last year in April.
As with these kind of class action lawsuits, the movement of money is slow, and the consumers are typically the last ones to get paid. To facilitate getting all these payments divied out, a familiar face in the 2020 election is helping out consumers.
Andrew Yang is known mostly as a one-issue candidate that came to prominence in the 2020 Democratic Primary. Spending much of his time talking about automation and the future of the American economy, he proposed a UBI, or Universal Basic Income, to provide security for workers in an increasingly unstable gig-economy. Four months into the economic disruptions following COVID-19, Yang looks quite prophetic. The concept of a UBI, which was heretical in January, is being built into state and local test programs in July.
Mr. Yang proved that he was not a one-issue grand-stander recently, as he has begun to harp on the message of personal data.
In an email to Yang’s 2020 presidential mailing list via non-profit Humanity Forward, Yang made the announcement that he was partnering with a new organization, the Data Dividend Project:
Hello, I hope all is great with you!
We recently helped launch the Data Dividend Project to get people paid for their data. Well, there’s a way to get money right now if you used Yahoo’s email services.
You may have heard that there were multiple data breaches of Yahoo accounts between 2012 and 2016. Someone sued and got a settlement on behalf of consumers – a $117.5 million settlement fund for everyone who used Yahoo email.
That means if you had an email account with Yahoo between 2012 and 2016, whether a paid account or a free account, they owe you two years of free credit monitoring, and if you already have a credit monitoring service, then they owe you up to $358. For real. The money’s in a bank account waiting for Yahoo users to claim. We have top lawyers who looked at it, and it’s all legit and good to go.
Via the Data Dividend Project’s website, you can provide a list of email addresses and phone numbers that you can verify, to see if they show up in any future data breaches or class actions. Then the DDP acts as your data broker, to try to get you your cut of the settlement. Certainly a progressive move, in the face of personal data-based backlashes against data vacuums like Facebook and Google.
For more on Data Breaches & News, check out the tag our our blog. And if you’re looking for a way to profit off of your data beyond class action payments, the BIGtoken app pays users directly for the uses of their personal data.