Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to a $90 million payment to settle a privacy lawsuit filed 10 years ago.
According to NYPost, the settlement between Meta and the plaintiffs was filed earlier this week in US Federal Court in San Francisco and must be approved by a judge. As part of the agreement, Facebook agreed to delete all data collected to track users’ visits to third-party websites between 2010 and 2011.
The lawsuit was filed after users allege Facebook continues to track them even after they’ve signed out of the social network using a proprietary plug-in in a web browser. Once the case made its way through the federal court system, Facebook won the case three times in court trials.
However, in 2020, the ruling was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals and found that Facebook caused “economic harm” by collecting user data and monetizing it even if the plaintiffs were not involved. The application has exited the site. The appeals court ruled that Facebook needed to get users’ consent before collecting their personal data.
Plaintiffs’ attorney David Straite said the settlement not only repairs the harm Facebook has inflicted on affected users but also sets a precedent for dealing with such issues in the future. Reportedly, the $90 million payment is just one of ten major class-action lawsuits related to data privacy in the US.
The settlement was announced on the same day that the state of Texas sued Meta for hundreds of billions of dollars, alleging that the social network violated the privacy of Texans by using technology facial recognition face disagree. The lawsuit claims Facebook and Instagram tracked photos and videos that people posted to their accounts using facial recognition technology. Facebook believes that this lawsuit is baseless.
In addition to Facebook, Texas is also waging an ongoing legal battle against Google over what it accuses of “Google has a monopoly on the online advertising market.”