Facebook has reached a preliminary settlement in the lawsuit seeking damages for letting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, have access to users’ private data. Neither the amount nor the terms are specified.
According to a legal document filed Friday with a San Francisco court, the American social network indicates that it is submitting the draft of an “agreement in principle” and has requested the suspension of proceedings for 60 days “in order to finalize the agreement in writing. and present it to the court.
The agreement comes as the director of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, Mark Zuckerberg, and its resigning chief executive, Sheryl Sandberg, were due to testify in court in September in connection with the scandal.
In a collective lawsuit initiated in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of having violated privacy protection rules by sharing their data with third parties, including the firm Cambridge Analytica, linked to the presidential campaign. American Donald Trump in 2016.
Fine of 5 billion
Cambridge Analytica, which has since closed, had collected and used, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform had given it access. This information would have been used to develop software used to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump.
In July 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for ‘misleading’ its users and imposed independent oversight of its handling of personal data.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of apps suspected of abusing it, restricted the amount of information available to developers in general and made it easier for users to the calibration of personal data sharing restrictions.
/ATS