Meta Pays $725m to Settle Privacy Case

In the US, Meta, the parent of Facebook, has agreed to settle a lawsuit relating to the Cambridge Analytica data breach, and will pay $725m, reportedly the largest sum in a privacy-based class action.

The payment is the latest - and may still not be the last - in a string of fines and settlements connected to the case stretching back four years. In July 2019 Facebook paid US regulators another record, $5bn - this was the biggest fine ever levied on a tech company by the FTC, but was still described as 'derisory' by commentators at the time, given the tech giant's revenue.

For the latest settlement, which is still subject to the approval of District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, Meta did not admit wrongdoing and stressed that since 2019 it had overhauled its privacy policies, adding that settling was 'in the best interest of our community and shareholders'.

The class on whose behalf the complaint was filed includes all those who used Facebook in the US during the period from 24th May 2007 to 22nd December 2022 - and numbers around 250-280 million people, according to court papers. A further hearing is due on 2nd March.

The action claims that Facebook shared users' information with outside developers without their permission. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, information including contact lists was harvested from around 270,000 users of a separate app, and then sold to other companies including the political targeting consultancy, which worked for the campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz among others.