(Washington) Facebook has reached a preliminary agreement in a long-running lawsuit seeking damages from the social network for allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ private data.
Updated yesterday at 11:55 PM.
According to a court document filed Friday in San Francisco court, Facebook said it was submitting a draft “agreement in principle” and requested a 60-day suspension of proceedings “to finalize the agreement in writing and appear in court.”
Social Network does not indicate the amount or terms of this Agreement in this class action.
Asked by AFP, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, “has no comment at this time.”
The deal comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, who announced her resignation in June after 14 years with the company, were due to testify in court in September in connection with the scandal.
In a procedure that began in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Cambridge Analytica, which has since shut down, collected and used the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, without their consent, to which the platform had given them access.
This information could have been used to develop software used to guide American voters’ vote for Donald Trump.
In July 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for “misleading” its users and imposed independent oversight of its handling of personal data.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of apps suspected of abuse, restricted the amount of information developers can access publicly, and made it easier for users to calibrate personal data sharing restrictions.