Facebook will pay $725 million to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data leak lawsuit
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has agreed to pay £600 million to resolve a lawsuit involving a data breach connected to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. In the ongoing battle, Facebook was accused of granting access to user data to third parties, including the British company.
The requested amount is the highest in a US class action involving data privacy.
While denying wrongdoing, Meta claimed to have “revamped” its privacy policies in the previous three years. The settlement was “in the best interest of our community and stockholders,” the firm claimed in a statement. “We look forward to constructing services that consumers enjoy and trust while putting privacy first,” the statement reads.
The privacy issue involving Cambridge Analytica, which was made public in 2018, was centered on the collection of Facebook users’ personal data by outside apps. The now-defunct consultancy firm supported Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 by using the personal data from millions of US Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting.
The company acquired the data without users’ permission from a researcher who had been given permission by Facebook to utilize the platform and launch an app that collected data from millions of Facebook users. Facebook believes that the political consultant was inappropriately given access to the data of up to 87 million people.
Government inquiries into Facebook’s privacy policies were spurred by the incident, and this resulted in lawsuits and a prominent US congressional hearing when Meta head Mark Zuckerberg was questioned. In order to end a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its privacy practices, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion in 2019.
Additionally, the internet giant forked over $100 million to settle charges made by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it had deceived investors about the misuse of customer data.
Source
https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/facebook-to-pay-725-million-to-settle.html
