Meta Platforms’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives reportedly agreed mid-trial to settle a lawsuit by shareholders over the Cambridge Analytica privacy debacle.
Terms have not been disclosed.
The settlement was announced Thursday morning in the Delaware Court of Chancery, one day after the trial began, according to Reuters.
The deal resolves a lengthy battle stemming from allegations that Meta shared users’ information with the defunct right-wing political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Those allegations resulted in an enforcement action by the Federal Trade Commission, which claimed Meta violated a prior consent decree by sharing users’ data.
Meta settled the FTC charges in 2020 by paying $5 billion.
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After the company settled with the FTC, shareholders sued Zuckerberg and other company executives for $8 billion. Meta was not a defendant in the case.
Meta also was sued in 2018 by Facebook users who alleged in a class-action that Cambridge Analytica harvested information from millions of people without their knowledge or explicit consent. Cambridge Analytica obtained the information from researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who gathered the data in 2014 through the personality quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife,” according to reports.
Only 270,000 Facebook users downloaded Kogan’s app, but he reportedly collected data from up to 87 million of those people’s Facebook friends.
Meta unsuccessfully argued to U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria that the lawsuit should be dismissed on the grounds that users have no privacy claim on information they share with social media contacts.
Chhabria rejected that argument in 2019.
“Facebook’s argument could not be more wrong,” he wrote. “Sharing information with your social media friends does not categorically eliminate your privacy interest in that information.”
Meta agreed in 2022 to settle that case for $725 million. Chhabria approved the deal in 2023, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the settlement earlier this year.
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