Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a ten-year-old lawsuit. This targets a supposedly illegal collection of personal data operated by the firm.
User data collected on third-party sites
Filed in 2012, the class action accuses Meta of using the ” I like to track users when they visit third-party websites using cookies. The social network had however promised not to follow its users once they left its site. He would then have compiled these browsing histories into profiles to sell the information to advertisers.
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As explained The Verge, the lawsuit was dismissed in June 2017 after a federal judge said the plaintiffs failed to show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy or suffered damages financial. In 2020, however, a federal appeals court decided to relaunch the lawsuits, ruling in particular that Meta’s practices at the time had indeed caused economic harm to users. Furthermore, the appeals court affirmed that the collection of data required the explicit consent of the user, as specified in the Wiretap Act, a law on electronic eavesdropping.
Meta attempted to appeal to the Supreme Court, but was unsuccessful. This Monday, February 15, an agreement to settle the case was thus submitted to a court in California. This one, which must still be approved by a judge, stipulates that Meta must pay 98 million dollars to compensate users who have visited websites containing a ” I like from Facebook between April 2010 and September 2011. The company must also delete all data it has ” unfairly collected ” during this period.
The charges against Meta date from 2010 and 2011. Photograph: Joshua Hoehne / Unsplash
Difficult week for Meta
” Achieving 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 are happy to overcome this issue. », Assures a spokesperson for Meta. It is the seventh largest case related to privacy protection or a breach thereof in the United States. Also at the top of the rankings is Meta, which had to pay out $550 million in 2021 to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the firm of violating Illinois biometric information privacy law due to the use facial recognition in the tagging of photos and videos on Facebook.
The fact that this affair is coming back to the fore does not do very good publicity for Meta, which wants to restore its image at all costs and has even changed its name to achieve this. The company wants to put the many scandals of the past, many of which involve users’ personal data, behind it… but it’s not easy.
Earlier this week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant for using facial recognition without “ informed consent ” users. The Texas authorities are claiming several billion dollars in this case.