Facebook parent Meta agrees to pay $90M to settle decade-old privacy lawsuit
SAN FRANCISCO - Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a decade-old, class-action lawsuit over the social media giant’s use of "cookies" in 2010 and 2011 that tracked people online — even after they logged off of Facebook.The company, which posted profits of $39.37 billion in 2021, will pay the $90 million settlement to users who previously submitted verified claims, after lawyer fees are deducted.
Meta has also agreed to delete all the data it "wrongfully collected" during that period. The proposed settlement was filed late Monday in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California and must still be approved by a judge."Reaching 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’re glad to move past this issue," said Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri in a statement on Tuesday.According to the lawsuit, Facebook got people's consent to track them while they were logged in to its platform but promised to stop the tracking once they logged out.
But the suit claimed that Facebook continued to track users’ browsing activity on third-party sites even after they had logged off using a proprietary plug-in on a web browser.The case had been winding its way through lower courts since 2012 and last year the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
United States
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Cases: 46 252 513
Deaths: 750 423
Recovered: 0
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India
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Brazil
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