ISTANBUL
Facebook’s parent firm Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that involves the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal.
The social media firm provided third parties access to user data without their consent, the lawsuit claimed.
The settlement 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,” Keller Rohrback L.L.P, which represents the plaintiffs, said in a court filing Friday in the Northern District of California.
Meta, however, admitted no wrongdoing, saying the settlement was in the best interest of its shareholders.
The representative of plaintiffs, on the other hand, wrote in the filing “The amount of the recovery is particularly striking given that Facebook argued that its users consented to the practices at issue, and that the class suffered no actual damages. Plaintiffs dispute these characterizations, but acknowledge that they faced tremendous risks in this novel and complex case.”
Facebook in July 2019 was slapped with a massive $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission – the largest by the US agency against a tech company. The firm also agreed to pay $100 million amid charges of the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading its investors about user data risks.
The data leak scandal in 2018 involved political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica illegally using data from87 million Facebook users without any consent. The firm was also linked to former US President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
Cambridge Analytica’s then-CEO Alexander Nix stepped down in April 2018 after an undercover investigation by UK-based Channel 4 revealed that he had secretly recorded comments on attempts to influence political campaigns around the world.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified the same month before the US Senate, saying that his company “didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm … (including) for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech.”
In October 2021, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta Platforms, with Zuckerberg saying the social media company would focus its efforts on building what he calls the metaverse.
