Facebook parent settles suit in Cambridge Analytica scandal
San Francisco: Facebook has dramatically agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica access to the private data of tens of millions of users, four years after the 'Observer' exposed the scandal that mired the tech giant in repeated controversy.
A court filing reveals that Meta, Facebook's parent company, has in principle settled for an undisclosed sum a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the UK analysis firm.
Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, weren't disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court requested a 60-day stay of the action while lawyers finalise the settlement. That timeline suggested further details could be disclosed by late October.
The accord was reached just a few weeks before a September 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his long-time chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to depositions during the final phases of pre-trial evidence gathering, according to court documents.
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 as a Harvard University student, could have been deposed for up to six hours. Sandberg, who is stepping down as chief operating officer after a 14-year stint, could have been questioned for up to five hours.
The case sprang from 2018 revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist Stephen Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target US voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Trump's election as the 45th President.
The ensuring uproar led to a contrite Zuckerberg being grilled by lawmakers during a high-profile congressional hearing and spurred calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts. Even though Facebook's growth has stalled as more people connect and entertain themselves on rival services such as TikTok, the social network still boasts about 2 billion users worldwide, including nearly 200 million in the US and Canada.
The lawsuit, which had been seeking to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had asserted the privacy breach proved Facebook is a data broker and surveillance firm", as well as a social network.
