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Facebook parent, Meta, agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a prolonged class-action lawsuit that was started in 2018.
The legal issue arose after reports that the social media giant had permitted third-party apps, including those used by Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information without their knowledge to utilize it for political advertising.
“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in 2018.
“But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.”
The personality quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife,” developed by Aleksandr Kogan, is said to be the subject of the data harvesting scandal in March 2018, which allowed users’ public profiles and personal information to be collected to create psychographic profiles.
The information collected was later sent to Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm controlled by SCL Group, as part of a research effort through Global Science Research (GSR), a business Kogan created in 2014.
While it is estimated that 300,000 people completed the psychological test, the app discreetly collected the personal information of users who downloaded it and their Facebook friends without their knowledge, resulting in a dataset of 87 million profiles.
In 2015, Facebook suspended the personality quiz app and sent legal notices to GSR and Cambridge Analytica requesting the removal of the fraudulently obtained data.
However, it eventually emerged that the unlawful data was never deleted and that the consulting firm exploited the personal data from millions of Facebook accounts for voter profiling for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The tech giant released an Off-Facebook Activity feature to show users a summary of the apps and websites.
The agreement reminds all companies that user privacy is paramount and must be taken seriously. It also demonstrates that companies that violate users’ rights will not go unpunished.
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