Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running class action lawsuit filed in 2018.
The legal battle came in response to the discovery that the social media giant allowed third-party apps, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information without their consent for political advertising.
The proposed settlement would first report According to Reuters last week, this is the latest penalty the company has paid after many privacy incidents over the years. It requires the approval of a federal judge in the San Francisco Division of the United States District Court.
Facebook used to dismiss the lawsuit September 2019, claim Users have no legitimate privacy interest in the information they provide to their friends on social media.
of data collection scandalwhich came To light .in some cases) is collected to create a psychographic profile.
The app was developed in 2013 by an academic researcher named Alexander Kogan and his company Global Science Research (GSR) as part of a collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy owned by SCL Group. rice field.
About 300,000 users are said to have taken psychological tests, but the app collects personal data of users who installed the app and their Facebook friends without asking for explicit permission, and has been used by 87 million people. It led to a dataset that spanned profiles.
thisisyourdigitallife was subsequently banned by Facebook in 2015 for violating its platform policies, and the company also submitted legal requests to GSR and Cambridge Analytica to remove the improperly obtained data.
It was later discovered that the unauthorized data hadn’t been removed in the first place, and that the consulting firm (now defunct) Already used Prior to the 2016 US presidential election, we collect personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting purposes.
โThis was a betrayal of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,โ said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Said At the time. “But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and those who share data with us and expect us to protect it.”
The bombshell exposed heightened government scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic and led the company to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the British Information Commissioner’s Office (ICOs) 2019.
That same year, Meta was also slapped for a record-breaking $5 billion fine This was done to resolve accusations that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into its privacy practices and that the company undermined users’ choices to control the privacy of their personal information. .
Meta, who has not admitted to wrongdoing related to questionable data-sharing practices, has since took step Restrict third-party access to user information.
The tech giant has also rolled out a tool called Non-Facebook activity Allows users to ‘view an overview of the apps and websites that send information about your activity, and optionally clear this information from your account’.
