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 revelations that the social media giant allowed third-party apps, like those used by Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information without their consent for political advertising. .
The proposed settlement, first reported by Reuters last week, is the latest penalty paid by the company after years of privacy mishaps. It requires the approval of a federal judge in the San Francisco Division of the United States District Court.
It’s worth noting that Facebook tried to dismiss the lawsuit in September 2019. Users claimed they had no legitimate privacy interest in the information they provided to their friends on social media.
A data harvesting scandal that came to light in March 2018 involved a personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife” that collected users’ public profiles, page likes, date of birth, gender, location and even messages. (in some cases) could be stolen. Collected to create a psychographic profile.
Created in 2013 by a Cambridge University lecturer named Alexander Kogan, the app claims to reveal user personality traits based on what they like on Facebook by scraping user profile information in exchange for a small payment. was insisting.
Through Global Science Research (GSR), a company Kogan founded in 2014, the data was passed on to Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy owned by the SCL Group, as part of a research project.
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.
Unauthorized data was never removed in the first place, and a now-defunct consulting firm harvested personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting purposes ahead of the 2016 US presidential election. I later found out that I was using .
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, “This was a betrayal of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” It was also a breach of trust with those who expect us to protect it.”
The bombshell exposed increasing government scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, leading the company to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the British Intelligence Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in 2019.
That same year, an investigation initiated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) resulted in Meta being fined a record-breaking $5 billion and accusations that Meta’s privacy practices had been violated by users’ choices were settled. . personal information.
Meta, which has denied wrongdoing related to its questionable data-sharing practices, has since taken steps to reduce third-party access to user information.
In addition, we have deployed a tool called Facebook Off-Facebook Activity that allows users to “see an overview of the apps and websites that send us information about our activity, and optionally clear this information from our accounts.”
