Not our problems? a Passive Action page New & still learning
It wasn't my problem either. Until it was.
Most people look at how court records and class action settlements are handled and think: not our problem. I did too, until someone close to me got caught up in it. I had no idea what kind of industry this was. Now I spend my nights reading it, trying to understand what's wrong with it and how it could work better. So I made it my problem.
Not to tear anything down. To make it better.
I want this done better: clearer information, easier access, and a system that actually works for the people it affects. That's what Passive Action is. I built it, and I run it by myself.
Clearer information
Settlements in plain English, each linked to its official claim site, so you don't need a law degree to know if you're owed.
Easier access
Free to read, no account needed. The public record belongs to the public, and so should the help that makes sense of it.
Research that takes time
192,755 federal class actions read, matched and sorted into an index anyone can search, plus the research on what they show.
Here's what it takes to keep it running
Nobody else pays these bills. It isn't a fortune, but it adds up, and so does the time.
Servers
About $17 to $33 a month so far for the server, storage and email behind passiveaction.org, more as more people use it.
Domains
Six of them, renewed every year: passiveaction.org and .life, stoppayingtwice.com and .org, notourproblems.com and .org.
Data and research
Court records, settlement notices and news, collected and cleaned. Much of it is public; turning it into something readable is the work.
Time
60 to 80 hours of my own time so far: building, fixing, reading cases late at night. That's what one person could do alone.
The man who invented the intermittent windshield wiper
In the 1960s, an engineer named Robert Kearns patented the intermittent windshield wiper: the setting that lets your wipers pause between sweeps. Big carmakers put the idea on millions of cars. Kearns spent decades in court, at times as his own lawyer, and won against Ford in 1990 and Chrysler in 1992.
He wasn't against cars, or the people who build them. He just never accepted that it wasn't his problem, and he never backed down. I'm not him, and this isn't a lawsuit. But I understand him a little better every night.
This keeps going either way
Out of my own pocket, if it has to be. But if it's helped you and you want to buy me a beer, it keeps the momentum going. Sixty to eighty hours got it this far; a little support takes it a lot further. Every month of servers and every hour of research it pays for goes into changing something we think should work better.
Passive Action is not a nonprofit, so support isn't tax-deductible. Payments go through Stripe; I never see your card details.
We all have to start somewhere. Mine is passiveaction.org.