Facebook to pay $725 million to settle Cambridge Analytica lawsuit

Facebook’s parent company Meta will pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Users on the social-media giant sued the company after it was revealed that Facebook sold their private data to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump associate Steve Bannon was a vice president at the company, which went bankrupt in 2018 as the scandal roiled. An estimated 87 million Facebook users were affected.

Meta and the plaintiffs announced a settlement in August, but the details weren’t finalized until a filing late Thursday in San Francisco federal court. The announcement of the deal saved Mark Zuckerberg and ex-Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg from lengthy depositions. The company did not admit wrongdoing.

Zuckerberg was already grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill in 2018 over the scandal. Facebook has claimed to make a number of changes in response to the debacle, including restricting third-party access to user data.

In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other violations of users’ privacy.

The latest settlement “would be the largest data privacy or data breach class action settlement ever achieved in the United States,” plaintiffs attorneys said in the court documents. Facebook was also the defendant in the next-largest settlement, in a case which dealt with facial recognition technology.

A judge is expected to approve the deal at a hearing in March.

With News Wire Services