Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has agreed to pay $725m (£600m) to settle legal action over a data breach linked to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Over the course of the lengthy legal battle, the British company claimed that Facebook had given it access to the private information of millions of its users.
The attorneys claim that the proposed amount is the largest ever in a US data privacy class action.
While it did not admit any wrongdoing, Meta stated that it had “revamped” its approach to privacy over the preceding three years.
Settlement was “in the best interest of our community and shareholders,” the company said in a statement.
Looking ahead, “We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront.”
The fact that Meta has agreed to a serious pay-out was “not a surprise,” but that the sum in question was “not that much” money to the tech giant.
It’s less than a tenth of what it spent on “the metaverse” in just one year, he said.
This is a warning to other social media companies that mistakes can be very costly, so Meta is probably not too unhappy with this deal.
A federal judge in San Francisco must still approve the proposed settlement, which was revealed in a court filing late on Thursday.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver said in a statement, “This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of an unspecified number of Facebook users whose private information was improperly shared with third parties.
The ruling document states that the class size is “in the range of 250-280 million,” which includes all Facebook users in the United States during the “class period” of 24 May, 2007 through 22 December, 2022.
How the plaintiffs would actually get their settlement money is unclear.
A privacy and ethics researcher at The Alan Turing Institute named Janis Wong estimated that if every person decided to file a claim, the total cost would be no more than $2.50.
On March 2, 2023, the settlement hearing will be continued.
Despite the fact that the UK users are left out of the $725 million settlement, a competition law expert has proposed a multi-billion dollar class action suit against Meta regarding the exploitation of users’ data that includes the Cambridge Analytica time frame.
The Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal of 2018 revolved around the improper collection of users’ personal information by external apps with access to their accounts.
As part of their work for Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign, the now-defunct consulting firm used data from millions of US Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting.
Without users’ knowledge or consent, the company obtained the data from a researcher who had been granted permission by Facebook to deploy an app that scraped data from millions of users.
The social media giant has concluded that as many as 87 million users’ information was improperly shared with the firm.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, was questioned at a highly publicised US congressional hearing due to the scandal, which prompted government investigations into Facebook’s privacy practises and several lawsuits.
This year, Facebook paid the Federal Trade Commission $5 billion to end an investigation into the company’s privacy policies.
As part of the settlement, the tech giant paid $100 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to end SEC investigations into whether or not it had misled investors about the company’s use of user data.
State attorneys general are still looking into the matter, and the company is fighting a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.
