Meta Settles Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit

Facebook parent Meta Platforms has agreed to settle a lawsuit in a federal courtroom in San Francisco, over the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal.

Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing on Friday, Reuters reported, which asks the judge to put the class action on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalise a written settlement.

Facebook faced multiple lawsuits over the scandal – the latest of which was filed by Washington DC, Attorney General Karl Racine in May this year.

Cambridge Analytica scandal

It was back in April 2018, when Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were at the centre of a row over the misuse of personal data on 87 million people, mostly in the US.

Indeed, such was the fallout at the time that the UK-based firm was forced to shut down soon afterwards.

In the UK Facebook was fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), because of the data sharing scandal, and in October 2019 the firm dropped its appeal against the ICO fine.

Meanwhile in the United States, the US Federal Trade Commission in July 2019 hit Facebook a record-breaking fine of $5 billion (£4bn) for its involvement in the matter.

Facebook has also faced lawsuits in the US over the matter.

In October 2020 the social networking giant was hit with a mass action lawsuit in the UK, after nearly one million Britons joined a lawsuit organised by a group called ‘You owe Us‘, which has the stated intention “to show that the world’s biggest companies are not above the law.”

Proposed settlement

Now Reuters has reported that Meta has reached an in-principle agreement to settle the US lawsuit filed by US users, that began back in 2018.

Facebook and its lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding the settlement, Reuters reported.

Of the two law firms representing the plaintiffs, Keller Rohrback did not comment while Bleichmar Fonti & Auld declined to comment.

By settling the lawsuit, Zuckerberg and departing COO Sheryl Sandberg avoid having to appear at their 20 September scheduled depositions.