Facebook Legal Notice E-Mail is Real

Friday morning I got an e-mail titled "Re: LEGAL NOTICE OF SETTLEMENT OF CLASS ACTION". Normally I'd delete it thinking it was someone in Nigeria offering me millions, but after reading it, I thought I'd check it out a little closer and guess what? It's real and offering Facebook users CASH!

OK, so it's not a LOT of cash. Like a cap of $10, but still, it's very real and it went out to an estimated 125 MILLION Facebook users (of an estimated 165 million users worldwide)

Remember back in 2011 when you got that notice from Facebook that said they were going to randomly put us in 'Sponsored Story" ads based on our 'Likes"? It caused some very embarrassing situations and there was nothing you could do to stop it other than not liking anything or not being a member of Facebook.

“Fraley vs. Facebook”  was born. Angel Fraley sued Facebook saying that Facebook was using our likenesses without notifying us OR paying us. She later dropped out of the class action lawsuit, saying that lawyers were digging up embarrassing stuff about her, mainly from her Facebook account.

Fast forward to December 2012 when the suit was settled for $20 million to be divvied up among us! Here's the catch, if too many people file the form and the 'take' gets to $4.99 or less each, the money will instead go to charities (which is fine with me too)

So if you didn't already delete the e-mail as spam (which I'm guessing a LOT of you already did) go ahead and take a minute to file for your take (or the non-profits take) and continue to 'like' freely because the part of the suit that should interest you the most is this: Facebook now has to give all their users “additional information about and control over the use of their names and profile pictures in Sponsored Stories.”

I'm going to celebrate by liking hundreds of pages and products this weekend!