It becomes especially awkward when those companies have their bluff called, get an onslaught of arbitration claims, and then try to backpedal into a class action. “We were just using an anti-class action language because we thought that would scare away litigation but now we want it” is not a super compelling story to have to tell a fair judge.
This news article [0] is more recent. It seems they settled for more than 3x the figure in the original article. They also agreed to injunctive terms, the most noteworthy (to me) being "Bar Intuit from requiring users to re-enter data when they upgrade from a free product and then return to the free product".
This happened to Intuit. Couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people /s. https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-intuit/l-a-sant...