Facebook has reached a preliminary agreement in a lawsuit launched in 2018 seeking damages from the social network for having allowed third parties, including the company Cambridge Analytica, to have access to users’ private data.
According to a court document filed Friday, August 26, with a San Francisco court, Facebook requested a sixty-day stay of proceedings. “in order to finalize the agreement in writing and present it to the court”.
The social network does not mention the amount or the terms of this agreement in this class action lawsuit. Asked by AFP, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did not respond on Saturday.
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should have testified
The deal comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief executive Sheryl Sandberg, who announced his resignation in June after fourteen years with the companywere to testify in court in September, in connection with this scandal.
In a procedure launched four years ago, Facebook users accused the social network of having violated privacy protection rules by sharing their data with third parties, including the firm Cambridge Analytica, linked to Donald’s presidential campaign. Trump in 2016. The company, which has since closed, had collected and exploited, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users. This information would have been used to develop software intended to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump.
A $5 billion fine in 2019
In July 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion (the euro is at par with the dollar) for ” deceived “ its users and imposed on it independent control of its management of personal data.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of suspected abusers, restricted the amount of information available to developers in general, and made it easier for users to the calibration of personal data sharing restrictions.
The criticisms of Facebook have not ceased, however. In 2021, the “Facebook Files”, thousands of internal documents revealed by a whistleblower, showed the flaws in the regulation of the powerful American social network.