Highlights
- The lawyers involved in the case believe that Meta’s settlement is one of the 10 largest data-privacy settlements in the US history.
- Facebook has had trouble times facing missteps over user privacy in recent times.
Facebook’s parent Meta Platforms Inc. has settled a decade-old class-action lawsuit over its use of “cookies” in 2010 and 2011, which tracked people online even when they logged out of the Facebook platform.
The proposed settlement is yet to be approved by a judge. According to it, Meta has agreed to delete all the “wrongfully collected” data during that period. Formerly known as Facebook, the company posted profits of USD 39.37 billion in 2021 and will have to pay USD 90 million to users who filed a claim after lawyer fees are deducted.
The lawsuit elaborated that Facebook got people’s consent to track them while logged in to its platform and promised to stop tracking when they logged out. But the suit claimed that Facebook continued to track users’ browsing history even after they logged out.
Initially, the case was running in the lower courts in 2012, and last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Facebook has had trouble times facing missteps over user privacy in recent times. What complicated matters were issues surrounding misinformation, hate speech, and threats to democracy.
The lawyers involved in the case believe that Meta’s settlement is one of the 10 largest data-privacy settlements in the US history. But it is a fraction of Facebook’s USD 650 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit last year. The previous year’s claim was that Facebook used photo face-tagging and other biometric data without permission from users.
Experts’ view
“Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders and we’re glad to move past this issue, said Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri.
