Meta has agreed to pay $725mn to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed that the social media giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, allowed third parties to access users’ personal information.
The proposed amount would be the largest settlement achieved in a US data privacy class action, and the most Meta has ever paid out in a lawsuit, revealed in a court filing released on Thursday.
The long-running case was prompted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, where a company whistleblower revealed that Facebook allowed the British political consulting firm to access the personal data of up to 87mn users. However, the class action lawsuit expanded the remit to include other third parties that may have inappropriately used Facebook data.