Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 23, 2019.
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Facebook
users have less than one month remaining to apply for their share of a $725 million settlement related to Facebook’s privacy violations. This settlement was a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had significant consequences for the U.S. electoral process and Silicon Valley.
According to the law firm Keller Rohrback, which handled the class action suit, this settlement, signed in December 2022, stands as the largest of its kind. It marked the resolution of years of legal proceedings regarding Facebook’s involvement in inappropriate data sharing with a data consultancy firm utilized by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal resulted in Meta, Facebook’s parent company, incurring a total cost of nearly $5.9 billion. Apart from the $725 million settlement, the company paid a record-breaking $5 billion settlement to the Federal Trade Commission, along with an additional $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Individuals who maintained an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until August 25 to submit a claim and be eligible for compensation. The exact payment amount for each individual is yet to be determined, as it depends on the number of claims submitted and the duration of each user’s Facebook account activity.
To make a claim, Facebook users can visit Facebookuserprivacysettlement.com. They need to provide their name, address, email address, and confirm that they resided in the U.S. and were active Facebook users within the specified time frame.
Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in 2021 and reached a settlement on the class action suit a year later. The company has undergone significant changes since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, expanding its presence in the metaverse with new hardware products like the upcoming Quest 3. It has also introduced innovations like the Llama 2 large language artificial intelligence model, Reels to compete with TikTok, and most recently, Threads to rival Twitter.
The breach compelled Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, to testify before Congress and issue public apologies through full-page advertisements. Zuckerberg acknowledged the company’s shortcomings and pledged to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future. “I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” said Zuckerberg.
It is important to note that the $725 million settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.
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