Forbes Video Privacy Settlement (Closed)

Who Was Eligible?

Who the settlement covered:

• Four conditions had to hold together, and the administrator stated two of them as outright disqualifiers.
• You had to have been a Forbes US online or mobile application account holder, or a Forbes newsletter subscriber, or both. A reader who simply visited forbes.com without an account or a newsletter was never in this class.
• You had to have held an active Facebook account at the same time. The administrator put this plainly: without one running alongside your Forbes account or subscription, you did not qualify, however much Forbes video you watched.
• You had to have actually watched a video on forbes.com, from the same device and the same browser you used for Facebook. That is the whole theory of the case, because the pixel could only tie a video to a person where both sat in one browser.
• And the viewing had to fall between 25 July 2020 and 1 December 2022.
• The mechanics are worth understanding even now, because the same pixel sits on a great many publishers' sites. The Video Privacy Protection Act treats information identifying someone as having requested particular video material as protected, and the allegation was that the pixel passed exactly that to Facebook without consent. Forbes denied it disclosed any such information and denied violating any law, settling to avoid the cost of continuing.

How Much Did It Pay?

The payment was up to $15 per approved claimant. That was the figure the administrator published, and it is the only per-person number this settlement ever carried.

This page previously listed a maximum of $189. No document on the court-authorized settlement website supports that, and it has been removed.

The page also described a $10 million fund. The administrator's own site never states a fund figure, so that number is not repeated here either.

What “up to” meant in practice depended on how many valid claims arrived, as it does in any fund of this shape. A claimant who filed on time and passed review could expect $15 at the ceiling and less if the volume of claims required scaling.

Payments followed final approval rather than the claim deadline. The court heard final approval on 17 November 2025, and the administrator posted a final approval order afterwards.

How this claim was filed

This settlement is closed, so the steps below are kept for reference only — they no longer lead anywhere you can file.

• There is nothing to file. The claim window shut on 4 November 2025 and the court has already granted final approval, so no late route exists.
• If you filed before the deadline, your questions go to Kroll Settlement Administration, which ran this one. Call 833-621-7730, or write to Forbes.com Privacy Settlement, care of Kroll Settlement Administration, PO Box 225391, New York, NY 10150-5391.
• The court-authorized website is forbesvppasettlement.com, and it remains up with the settlement agreement, the preliminary approval order, the claim form, the notice and the final approval order. Anything describing itself as an extended Forbes claim window is not that site.
• A quirk worth knowing if you go looking: the site is headed Ramirez v. Forbes Media, but its documents and its claim form are filed under Lamb v. Forbes Media. Lamb was the earlier federal case in the Southern District of New York, terminated in April 2025, and the settlement was completed through the Florida action.
• For readers who arrived hoping to claim, the useful lesson is about the trigger rather than the money. Pixel cases under the Video Privacy Protection Act turn on whether you watched video while logged into a social account in the same browser, which is a fact about your own browsing that no administrator can look up for you.

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