Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million as a settlement to a long-running lawsuit that accused the social network of permitting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ private data.
This amount was revealed in a court filing late Thursday, December 22.
“The proposed settlement of $725,000,000 is the biggest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Meta (Facebook) has ever paid to resolve a private class action,” lawyers for the plaintiffs had reported during the filing.
Meanwhile, Meta (Facebook) has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which still has to be approved by a judge in the San Francisco division in the US District Court.
But it was reported in August that Facebook had reached a preliminary agreement, although the amount and terms of the settlement had not been announced then.
The lawsuit which was initiated in 2018, after Facebook users had accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties, including the British firm Cambridge Analytica, had been linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, now shut down had collected and exploited the personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent, according to the lawsuit.
That information had then been reportedly used to develop software to steer US voters in favor of Trump.
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