Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a 2018 lawsuit that accused the social network of allowing third parties such as Cambridge Analytica to access users’ private data.
The value of the agreement was disclosed on Thursday night (22) following a lawsuit.
“The $725 million proposed settlement is the highest claim ever reached in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to settle a private class action,” lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said.
Facebook has not confessed to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which has yet to be approved by a San Francisco judge.
It was reported in August that Facebook had reached a preliminary agreement, although terms and amounts were not disclosed at the time.
In 2018, at the beginning of the process, Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties, including the British company Cambridge Analytica, linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Cambridge Analytica, which has since been closed, collected and exploited the personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent, according to the lawsuit.
This information would have been used in the development of software to guide American voters in favor of Trump.
Facebook then removed access to thousands of apps suspected of abusing its data, restricted the amount of information available to developers and made it easier for users to regulate restrictions on sharing personal data.
In 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for misleading its users and imposed independent oversight of the social network’s handling of personal data.
AFP
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