In order to resolve a long-running legal dispute, Facebook parent company Meta has agreed to pay $725 million. The lawsuit claimed that the social network had permitted third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information.
The sum was revealed in a court document submitted late on Thursday.
“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.
As part of the settlement, Facebook has not admitted any wrongdoing; however, a judge in the San Francisco division of the US District Court must still approve it.
Facebook reportedly reached a preliminary agreement in August, though the settlement’s sum and details weren’t made public at the time.
In 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of breaking privacy regulations by sharing their data with third parties, including the British company Cambridge Analytica, which was connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This led to the filing of the case.
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.
It has been claimed that this data was used to create software that influenced US voters to support Trump.
Since then, Facebook has restricted developer access to information, cut back on the number of apps that had access to its data, and made it simpler for users to set limits on the sharing of their personal data.
For deceiving its users in 2019, federal authorities penalized Facebook $5 billion and established independent control of its personal data handling.
