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Back in 2018, when Meta was still known as Facebook, a scandal hit the company unlike any that we’d seen before or have seen since. It turned out that Meta had allowed access to user data to a number of third parties, including a British political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica, which had links to Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign.
On Friday, over four years after the scandal broke, Meta agreed to settle a lawsuit that will see it pay out $725 million to users who sued the platform over the privacy breach. This amount is separate from the $5 billion settlement Meta agreed to pay the FTC in 2020.
The long-running legal dispute arose from one of the most high-profile data privacy scandals of the internet age. It caused a moment of reckoning for internet users around the world, as people realized the fragility of their online privacy and the risks of relying solely on third-party companies to protect them from malicious actors.
