Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle legal action over the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal.
The long-running dispute accused the social media giant of allowing third parties, including the British firm, to access Facebook users’ personal data.
It is the “largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action,” Keller Rohrback L.L.P, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, said in a court filing late Thursday announcing the settlement.
Meta, which did not admit wrongdoing, said it had “revamped” its approach to privacy over the past three years.
In a statement, the company said settling was “in the best interest of our community and shareholders”.
“We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront.”
The class action lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy firm linked to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
The consulting firm, now defunct, worked for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign and used personal information from millions of US Facebook accounts for the purposes of voter profiling and targeting.
After the revelations, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened a probe into Facebook over concerns that the social media firm had violated the terms of a previous agreement with the agency, which required it to give users clear notifications when their data was being shared with third parties.
The suggested settlement, which was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday, is subject to the approval of a federal judge in San Francisco.
