A lawsuit claiming that the world’s largest social network service permitted millions of its users’ personal information to be given to Cambridge Analytica, a company that aided Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016, has been tentatively settled by Facebook’s corporate parent.
In court filings released late Friday, there was no mention of the terms of the settlement agreed by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram. A 60-day suspension of the case was requested in the filing in San Francisco federal court so that attorneys could complete the deal. According to that schedule, the further information might be made public by the end of October.
According to court filings, the agreement was made just a few weeks before the deadline of September 20 for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his longtime top operational officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to participate in depositions during the last stages of pre-trial evidence collection.
The deposition of Mark Zuckerberg, who established Facebook in 2004 while an undergraduate at Harvard University, might have lasted up to six hours. After serving as COO for 14 years, Sandberg is leaving her position. She could have been interrogated for up to five hours.
The case was brought about by 2018 reports that Cambridge Analytica, a company linked to Stephen Bannon, a political adviser for Donald Trump, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal data of roughly 87 million Facebook users. Following the 2016 election campaign that resulted in Trump’s victory as the 45th president that information was used to target American voters.
The ensuing outrage prompted calls for people to cancel their Facebook accounts and resulted in a repentant Zuckerberg being interrogated by senators during a prominent congressional hearing. Facebook still has approximately 2 billion members globally, including roughly 200 million in the United States and Canada, despite the fact that its growth has slowed as more people connect and amuse themselves on competing sites like TikTok.
The lawsuit claimed that the privacy violation demonstrated Facebook’s status as both a social network and “data broker and surveillance corporation” in addition to a class action lawsuit on behalf of Facebook members.
