Data breach: Facebook will pay $725 million in settlement

In order to resolve a long-running legal dispute, Facebook parent company Meta has agreed to pay $725 million. The lawsuit claimed that the social network had permitted third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica, to access users' personal information.

The sum was revealed in a court document submitted late on Thursday.

According to the plaintiffs' attorneys, the $725,000,000 proposed settlement "is the highest recovery ever reached in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action."

As part of the settlement, Facebook has not admitted any wrongdoing; however, a judge in the San Francisco division of the US District Court must still approve it.

Facebook was said to have reached a preliminary agreement in August, though the sum and specifics of the settlement were not disclosed at the time.

By sharing their data with third parties, such as the British company Cambridge Analytica, which was related to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook users claimed that the social network had violated privacy laws in 2018. This led to the filing of the case in 2018.
The lawsuit claimed that without the knowledge of the 87 million Facebook users, Cambridge Analytica, which has since shut down, gathered and used their personal information.

It has been claimed that this data was used to create software that influenced US voters to support Trump.

Since then, Facebook has restricted developer access to information, cut back on the number of apps that had access to its data, and made it simpler for users to set limits on the sharing of their personal data.

For deceiving its users in 2019, federal authorities penalized Facebook $5 billion and established independent control of its personal data handling.