Facebook agreed to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data privacy lawsuit

The company was accused of breaking consumer privacy laws four years ago by disclosing the personal information of users to outside parties.

Facebook has agreed to settle a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco seeking damages for allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access to users’ private data.

So far, no financial terms have been disclosed, and the judge has ordered that the class action be put on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook reach an agreement in writing.

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In a four-year-old lawsuit, it was claimed that Facebook had shared user personal information with organisations like the since-defunct British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in violation of consumer privacy laws.

However, Facebook has stated that its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims.”

Facebook users sued the company in 2018 after it was revealed that a UK research firm connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign obtained access to the data of up to 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers.

In arduous legal battles over pretrial information sharing, consumer attorneys have gradually increased their power to demand access to Facebook’s internal documents in order to substantiate their claims that the company failed to protect their personal data.

If Facebook’s parent company had lost the case, it might have been liable for hundreds of millions of dollars.