Facebook owner Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, have access to users’ personal information.
The proposed settlement, revealed late Thursday night in court documents, involves a lawsuit brought after revelations in 2018 that Facebook allowed to the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access the data of 87 million users.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said that the proposed settlement is the largest ever reached in a personal data class action in the US and the largest amount Meta has ever paid to settle a class action.
Meta did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge in San Francisco. The company said in a statement that the settlement “is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders.”
Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, worked on Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign and gained access to the personal information of millions of Facebook accounts to gather data on voters and target them effectively.
Cambridge Analytica obtained the information without users’ consent from a researcher whom Facebook had allowed to develop an application on its network that collected data from millions of Facebook users.
In 2019 the Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its privacy practices and $100 million to settle charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it misled investors about its misuse of user data , as reported by Reuters and relayed by the Athens News Agency.
Investigations by state prosecutors are ongoing and the company is fighting a lawsuit by the Washington attorney general.
Yesterday’s settlement settles charges from Facebook users that the company violated various federal and state laws by allowing app developers and business partners to collect their personal data on a widespread basis without their consent.
Source: News Beast
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