Meta to fork out $90 million to settle 2012 data privacy lawsuit

Facebook’s parent company Meta has reportedly decided to pay $90 million to settle a decade-old lawsuit, which alleged that the social media platform kept tracking its users’ internet activities even after they had signed out.

As part of the settlement, the California-based tech giant has also obliged to delete all data garnered to track users’ third-party website visits between 2010 and 2011. However, the settlement between Meta and the plaintiffs is subject to San Francisco federal court’s approval.  

“We are grateful to the Ninth Circuit for its watershed ruling and to Facebook for negotiating this resolution in good faith. This settlement not only repairs harm done to Facebook users but sets a precedent for the future disposition of such matters,” said David Straite, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs and a New York-based partner at DiCello Levitt Gutzler.  

“I’ve been involved in more than a few data privacy matters in which the defendant would only consider monetary relief or window-dressing injunctive relief. We applaud Facebook’s willingness to also delete the user data that we alleged was improperly collected.”   

“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,” Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement.   

Media reports have suggested that the 2012 data privacy lawsuit has alleged that Facebook violated privacy and wiretapping laws by using ‘plug-ins’ to store cookies between April 2010 and September 2011. This resulted in the social media giant easily tracking users’ visits to third-party websites that contained “like” buttons.  

Even though Facebook is believed to have obtained consent to track subscribers while logged and promised to stop the tracking once the subscriber logged out, the class action alleges that Facebook continued to track users’ browsing activity even after they had logged off the social media platform.  

Earlier, Meta has also been sued by the US state of Texas for collecting biometric data of millions of people without their consent.