Facebook has agreed “in principle”, to settle the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit that claims damages from the social media company for allegedly giving third parties access to personal data of millions of users. As per a document filed by Facebook in a San Francisco court, the company said that it was submitting a draft “agreement in principle” and has requested a stay of proceedings for 60 days to finalize it. Facebook hasn’t disclosed any amount or terms of the agreement.
AFP quoted Facebook as saying that the company had “no comment to share at this time.”
The development has come up as date of court testimony of Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg approaches. He and Facebook’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg are due to testify in court in September.
In a lawsuit initiated in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties including the firm Cambridge Analytica, which was linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica — which has since shut down — had collected and exploited, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform had given it access.
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There are allegations that the information was used to develop software steering US voters in favor of Trump.
In 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for misleading its users and imposed independent oversight of its personal data management.
(With inputs from agencies)
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