Meta platform, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle the class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
The proposed settlement is defined to be the largest to ever be achieved in a U.S. data privacy class action.
According to the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, this historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case.
The proposed settlement has to be approved by a federal judge in the San Francisco division of the U.S. District Court.
In the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, the company allowed to access to the personal data of around 87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent.
The way Facebook managed user data violated a 2011 privacy settlement with the FTC. At the time, Facebook was accused of deceiving people about how the social network giant handled their data. An FTC settlement obliged the company to review its privacy practices.
In March 2018, it was publicly revealed that a team of academics had collected a huge amount of user data and shared the information with Cambridge Analytica, which was a commercial data analytics company that allegedly used it to target US voters in the 2016 Presidential election.
The researchers used an app named “thisisyourdigitallife” developed by the University of Cambridge psychology lecturer Dr. Aleksandr Kogan to collect user data.
The app which was available to users since 2014, was provided by Global Science Research (GSR) and asked users to take an online survey for $1 or $2. The app requested access to the user’s profile information, and over 270,000 users gave the app permission to use their personal details for academic research.
In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a $5 Billion fine to settle the investigation conducted by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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