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, access to users’ private data.
The amount was revealed in a court filing Thursday night.
The proposed settlement of $725,000,000 is the largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action lawsuit and the most Facebook has paid to settle a private class action lawsuit.
Facebook hasn’t admitted to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which still needs to be approved by a San Francisco division judge in US District Court, but we’ve known since August that Facebook had reached a preliminary settlement, though The amount and terms of the deal were not announced at the time.
The lawsuit began in 2018, when Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties including British firm Cambridge Analytica, which had been linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Cambridge Analytica, which has since closed, then collected and exploited the personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent. That information was allegedly used to develop software to target American voters in favor of Trump.
Since then, Facebook has 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 gauge restrictions on the sharing of personal data.
Federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for misleading its users and imposed independent oversight of its handling of personal data.