Meta, the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay 725 million dollars (at current exchange rates around 683 million euros) in a settlement to stop a class action lawsuit in the Cambridge Analytica case. The company was accused of allowing third-party companies to access users’ personal data without their consent.
The case has been open for some time and broke out in 2018 when it was revealed that Facebook had allowed the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica (now bankrupt) to access the data of 87 million users. That data was then used by Cambridge Analytica clients, including Donald Trump’s electoral committee, to create highly personalized campaigns for each individual user. Meta has already paid a $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that protects consumers, and $100 million to the SEC in this case. the body that supervises the stock exchange in the United States. Instead, this settlement is a class action settlement by users, will have to be approved by a federal judge in San Francisco and is the one that provides the largest settlement in the history of the United States in a data privacy case. The terms of the agreement did not oblige Meta to acknowledge errors in its actions, and the company in a press release defined the settlement as the measure “that best safeguards the interests of our community and our shareholders”.
