Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit over the company’s use of cookies to allegedly track Facebook users’ internet activity even after they had logged off from the platform.
The social media company must also delete all of the data it illegally collected from those users. The settlement was submitted for approval in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the agreement is subject to court approval.
The decade-old case which was filed in 2012, is about the Facebook’s use of the proprietary “Like” button to track users as they visited third-party websites – regardless of whether they actually used the button – in violation of the federal wiretapping laws, and then allegedly compiling those browsing histories into profiles for selling the information to advertisers.
As per the terms of the proposed settlement, the users who browsed non-Facebook websites that included the “Like” button between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, will be covered.
According to a Meta spokesperson, reaching a settlement in this case is in the best interest of their community and shareholders and they are glad to move past this issue.
If approved, this settlement would be one of the largest data privacy settlements in US history even though Facebook has faced even larger penalties in the past over alleged data privacy violations.
Image Credits : The Economic Times
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