Security News > 2022 > December > Facebook to Pay $725 Million to settle Lawsuit Over Cambridge Analytica Data Leak

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit filed in 2018.

The legal dispute sprang up in response to revelations that the social media giant allowed third-party apps such as those used by Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information without their consent for political advertising.

It's worth noting that Facebook previously sought to dismiss the lawsuit in September 2019, claiming users have no legitimate privacy interest in any information they make available to their friends on social media.

Created by a Cambridge University lecturer named Aleksandr Kogan in 2013, the app claimed to reveal users' personality traits based on what they had liked on Facebook by scraping their profile information in exchange for a small payment.

While around 300,000 users are said to have taken the psychological test, the app collected the private data of those who installed the app as well as their Facebook friends without seeking explicit permission, leading to a dataset spanning 87 million profiles.

Thisisyourdigitallife was subsequently banned by Facebook in 2015 for contravention of its platform policy, with the company also sending a legal request to GSR and Cambridge Analytica to delete the improperly acquired data.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/facebook-to-pay-725-million-to-settle.html