Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lengthy class-action lawsuit filed in 2018. application used by Cambridge Analytica to access users’ personal information without consent for political advertising purposes.
The proposed settlement, first reported by Reuters last week, is the latest penalty the company has to pay after a number of privacy incidents over the years. It still requires approval from a federal judge in the San Francisco Division of the United States District Court.
It should be noted that Facebook previously sought to dismiss the lawsuit in September 2019, saying that users had no legitimate interest in the privacy of the information they provided to their friends on the Internet. social network.
The data collection scandal, which came to light in March 2018, involved a personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife” that allowed the collection of public profiles of users, liked pages , date of birth, gender, location and even message (in some cases). to build psychological profiles.
Created by a Cambridge University professor named Aleksandr Kogan in 2013, the app claims to reveal users’ personality traits based on what they like on Facebook by collecting their profile information in exchange for a small payment.
Through Global Scientific Research (GSR), a company founded by Kogan in 2014, the data was then transferred to Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based policy consulting firm belonging to owned by the SCL Group, as part of a research project.
While some 300,000 users are said to have passed a psychological test, the app has been collecting private data from people who installed the app as well as their Facebook friends without explicit permission. clear, resulting in a dataset consisting of 87 million records.
thisisyourdigitallife was subsequently banned by Facebook in 2015 for violating their platform policies, and the company also submitted legal requests to GSR and Cambridge Analytica to delete inappropriately collected data.
It was only later discovered that the unauthorized data had never been deleted and that the now defunct consulting firm was using personal information from millions of Facebook accounts to profile and target voters before the 2016 US presidential election.
“This is a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. “But it’s also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect that data.”
The explosive disclosure prompted government scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, prompting the company to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the United States Information Commissioner’s Office. United Kingdom (ICO) United States in 2019.
In the same year, Meta was also fined a record $5 billion following an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into the company’s practices. company in privacy issues and address allegations that the company has undermined users’ choice in controlling their privacy. personal information.
Meta – which admitted no wrongdoing related to questionable data sharing – has since taken steps to restrict third-party access to user information use.
The tech giant went on to roll out a tool called Off-Facebook Activity that allows users to “see a summary of the apps and websites that send us information about your activity and delete the information.” it from your account if you want”.