Pay to avoid an embarrassing lawsuit, the method is well known in the United States. Stuck in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a company linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 which had access to private user data, Facebook opted for this solution. According to a court document filed Friday in a San Francisco court, Facebook said it was submitting a draft “agreement in principle” and requested a stay of proceedings for 60 days “to finalize the agreement in writing and appear in court”.
The deal comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief executive Sheryl Sandberg, who announced her resignation in June after 14 years with the company, were due to testify in court in September in connection with the scandal. The social network does not indicate the amount or the terms of this agreement in this collective lawsuit. Questioned by AFP, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, replied “not to have any comment to make for the time being”.
Software to influence votes
In a procedure initiated in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of having violated privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties, including the firm Cambridge Analytica. This company, which has since closed, had collected and used, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform had given it access.
This information would have been used to develop software used to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump. In July 2019, federal authorities fined Facebook $5 billion for “misleading” its users and imposed independent oversight of its handling of personal data.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has removed access to its data from thousands of applications suspected of abusing it, restricted the amount of information accessible to developers in general and made it easier for users to calibration of personal data sharing restrictions.