Meta has agreed to pay $725 million USD to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed the tech giant gave third parties access to Facebook user data without consent.
In a court filing on Thursday, the law firm representing the plaintiffs called the settlement the “largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action.”
The class action was filed in 2018 after Facebook reported that the personal data of 87 million users had been shared with the consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. The British firm had worked on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaigns. The firm used the data it obtained to target individuals with political messages.
The law firm says that Meta “granted numerous third parties access to their Facebook content and information without their consent, and that Facebook failed to adequately monitor the third parties’ access to, and use of, that information.”
In settling, Meta admitted no wrongdoing but says that its “revamped [its] approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program” over the last three years.
The settlement is still subject to approval by a federal judge in the Northern District of California.
In other tech news, NASA has retired its InSight Mars lander mission after four years.
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