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Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has recently agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that has been ongoing for several years. The lawsuit accuses Facebook of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access private user information and misleading users about its privacy practices.
However, federal judges in the Northern District of California must still approve the settlement, which does not admit any wrongdoing on Facebook’s part, according to CNBC. If approved, this settlement will be the largest ever in a data privacy class action case, and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit.
In a press statement, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver of Keller Rohrback LLP, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, said: “This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case.”
The Cambridge Analytica Scandal
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a data privacy controversy that occurred in 2018. It involved the unauthorized harvesting of millions of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that was hired by the campaign of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Facebook collected the data through a personality quiz app called “This Is Your Digital Life,” and Cambridge Analytica used this data to create targeted political ads for the Trump campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This scandal raised concerns about Facebook’s data privacy practices and prompted a class action lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
A spokesperson for Meta told CNBC: “We pursued a settlement as it’s in the best interest of our community and shareholders. Over the last three years, we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program.” The settlement states that since the 2018 scandal, Meta has “meaningfully changed” its data-sharing practices and no longer allows third parties access to the same data about users.