You Want Ten Bucks?

Sure you do. Go check your e-mail. Look for something called "Notice of Settlement". In my inbox, it says it came on August 26th.

Apparently, the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, In re Classmates.com Consolidated Litigation, Case No. 09-cv-0045-RAJ, is undergoing settlement. You remember Classmates.com, right? Annoying banner ad, told you about all the former classmates of yours that were there before you found Facebook and Twitter and found all the classmates you wanted to talk to were actually there instead? Perhaps you actually went there and found maybe one random actual classmate you'd have to break out the yearbook to know who it was?

If you signed up at any point between October 30, 2004 and February 23, 2011, congratulations! You're a potential plaintiff!
 
They also sent you e-mails that you immediately dumped in the spam folder. Some of those e-mails, apparently, violated your privacy rights, and they got taken to court over it. According to the Notice of Settlement e-mail, they're hashing out the details of a settlement, and assuming no hitches, they'll be splitting up $2.5 million among members of the class-action suit. You can become a party to that suit by looking for the e-mail and filling out a form within it. (The linked article also has a link to the claim form.) The share each member gets is going to depend on how many people sign up. They estimate about 250,000 claimants, which translates to about $10 per claimant, but if they're wrong on the estimate, the per-claimant dollar amount could go up or down. (If you have a personal beef with Classmates.com and want to sue them yourself, for whatever reason, you'll need to specifically exclude yourself from the class.)
 
The deadline to sign up is November 18. The final approval of the settlement will be December 15 at the district court in Seattle.
 
(While I've got you, we're going to stop with the post tags starting today. The blog interface changed and moved the tag insertion thingie somewhere other than the place where I type out posts, and a) I don't feel like making that extra click because b) I never really liked making those tags anyway because c) there's an internal search engine right at the top of the page if you need to look up a post and that works much better. So the tags are going bye-bye. Did any of you ever actually use them anyway?)