(Boursier.com) — Meta the parent company of Facebookfinally agreed to pay 725 million dollars to put an end to a collective lawsuit accusing the social network of having let third parties, including the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, access the personal data of its users … A project agreement to settle this litigation will occupy the discussions of the day on Wall Street, while this class action before the justice was triggered following the revelations in 2018 according to which Facebook gave Cambridge Analytica the ability to access the data of 87 million users.
According to plaintiffs’ attorneys, the proposed amount is “the largest ever awarded in a U.S. data privacy class action lawsuit and the largest ever.” Meta has ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit”… Meta, however, has still not admitted its wrongdoing under the agreement, which remains subject to the approval of a federal judge in San Francisco. The company, however, said in a statement that the settlement is “in the best interest of our community and our shareholders.” “Over the past three years, we have revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program,” Meta management said.
Cambridge Analytica has been suspected of using the data in election campaigns, including Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, as the company accessed personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting.
Annus horribilis
On the stock market, the year 2022 will have been particularly painful for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which has indeed lost more than 60% since January 1, bringing the capitalization of the Menlo Park firm to less than 315 billion dollars.
Faced with the fall in its advertising revenue in a much less buoyant economic environment against a background of rising interest rates, with changes in confidentiality led by Apple, to increased competition, and to a strategy deemed risky in the Metaverse, the ex-Facebook announced last month the first major social plan in its history: the group will thus cut 13% of its workforce, which represents more than 11,000 jobs. Mark Zuckerberg himself acknowledged “made mistakes”… In addition to these headcount cuts, Meta will reduce discretionary spending and extend the parallel hiring freeze into the first quarter of 2023.
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