Data Breach: Facebook To Pay $725M Settlement
Category: Tech News
Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running
lawsuit that accused the social network of allowing third parties, including
Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ private data.
The amount was
disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday.
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“The proposed settlement of $725,000,000 is the largest recovery ever
achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to
resolve a private class action,” lawyers for the plaintiffs said in the
filing.
Facebook has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the
settlement, which must still be approved by a judge in the San Francisco
division in the US District Court.
It was reported in August that
Facebook had reached a preliminary agreement, although the amount and terms of
the settlement were not then announced.
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The lawsuit was initiated in 2018, when Facebook users accused the
social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third
parties that included the British firm Cambridge Analytica, which had been
linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge
Analytica, which has since shut down, then collected and exploited the
personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent, the lawsuit
alleged.
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That information was allegedly used to develop software to steer US voters in
favor of Trump.
Facebook has since removed access to its data from
thousands of apps suspected of abusing it, restricted the amount of
information available to developers, and made it easier for users to calibrate
restrictions on personal data sharing.
Federal authorities fined
Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for misleading its users and imposed independent
oversight of its personal data management.
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