Meta Agrees To Settle Cambridge Analytica Case for $725M

Meta's proposal to settle for the Cambridge Analytica scandal is accepted.

The California-based social media giant recently agreed to pay close to $730 million to resolve a class action lawsuit against it for illegally sharing user data with data firms among the Donald Trump campaign team, per Business Times.

Facebook users filed the class action lawsuit Meta is settling on in 2018 when whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed Facebook's dealings with Cambridge Analytica, per CNBC.

Cambridge Analytica Settlement Details

A court filing revealed that Meta agreed to pay $725 million to resolve the class action lawsuit it is facing for giving access to the personal data of as many as 87 million users to the now-defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica and others in 2016, per Reuters.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the settlement the largest to ever be achieved in the US for a data privacy class action and the most Meta ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit.

Additionally, Derek Loser and Lesley Weaver, the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, said that the amount would provide substantial and meaningful relief to the class in a privacy case as complex and novel as this.

It helps the plaintiff's case that their lawyers had steadily gained leverage to gain access to the company's internal records to gain data to support their claims that Facebook, Meta's name at the time, had failed to protect users' personal data, per Bloomberg.

Had Meta declined to settle for the lawsuit, it would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars should it lose the case.

However, this settlement doesn't necessarily mean that Meta is admitting it did something wrong. According to the company's emailed statement, it pursued settling as it was in the best interest of its community and shareholders.

The company also said that it made changes to its approach to privacy and implemented a "comprehensive" privacy program. Since the case's filing, the social media giant prevented third parties from accessing data about users through their friends, which plaintiffs noticed in the settlement file.

Additionally, the company also restricted how third parties acquire and use Facebook users' information further, along with improving its methods for telling users what Facebook collects and shares about them.

Cambridge Analytica Scandal Refresher

The Cambridge Analytica scandal began through Aleksander Kogan and his company Global Science Research, who created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" in 2014.

Facebook users were paid to take a psychological test and the app collected the data and their friends on the social media platform.

Through this app, millions of Facebook profiles had their data mined and were shared with Cambridge Analytica, which allowed the latter company to build a software solution to help influence choices in elections.

The data firm was working with Trump's campaign team as part of the former president's bid for the presidency in the 2016 presidential elections.

Facebook explained that while Cambridge Analytica obtained the data they acquired legitimately, Kogan "lied" to it and violated its policies by transferring the data Kogan and his company acquired through the app.

The scandal placed Facebook's trustworthiness to keep people's personal data safe into question as it allowed a third-party developer to create an application to gather data, exploiting a loophole to do so without users knowing in the process, per Vox.