Owner of Facebook Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the social media behemoth gave access to user data to outside organizations, such as Cambridge Analytica.
The long-running case brought on by allegations in 2018 that Facebook had permitted the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access the data of as many as 87 million users would be resolved by the proposed settlement, which was revealed in a court filing late on Thursday.
The resulting Cambridge Analytica crisis sparked legal actions, regulatory inquiries into the company’s privacy policies, and a prominent U.S. congressional hearing when Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, was questioned by politicians.
In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its privacy practices and $100 million to address allegations that it misled investors about the misuse of users’ data by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company is defending itself against a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Washington, D.C., while investigations by state attorneys general are still ongoing.
According to a court document filed on Thursday, the settlement applies to between 250 million and 280 million Facebook users. The number of individuals who make legitimate claims for a share of the settlement will determine how much each user receives.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys claim they intend to petition the judge to grant them up to 25% of the settlement as legal fees, or around $181 million.
