Facebook has reached a tentative agreement in the lawsuit seeking damages following the four-year-old Cambridge Analytica case.
Financial terms were not disclosed, according to a document filed with the San Francisco court on Friday, according to information reported by Reuters. Facebook has requested a 60-day stay of proceedings while it finalizes the agreement in writing.
Asked by AFP, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, replied “not to have any comment to make for the time being”. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the group, and Sheryl Sandberg, current chief operating officer (COO) of Meta who announced her departure from the company in June, were due to testify in court in September in connection with the case.
Sharing personal data with third parties
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing users’ personal data with third parties such as UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which has since closed.
At the time, up to 87 million Facebook users had been affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident, which saw data gathered from a personality test shared with companies in a bid to profile voters ahead of the British election deadlines.
The social network paid a fine of 500,000 pounds in the United Kingdom in 2019, imposed on it by the OIC, the Commissioner for Information (the British equivalent of the CNIL) following an investigation into the misuse of personal data in political campaigns.