Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to pay $90 million dollars to settle a class action lawsuit that began a decade ago. The social network was accused of tracking the activity of users on the Internet, even if they had logged out of the platform.
The agreement is one of the largest that the social network company has made, but it is unlikely to affect to any extent the company that is valued at $590,000 million dollars.
If approved, the agreement will also be between the 10 largest data privacy class action settlement ever made in the United States.
“Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is what is best for our community and our shareholders, and we are pleased to overcome this problem”, said the spokesperson for Meta , Drew Pusateri, according to CNN Business.
The case, presented in 2012, has to do with a Facebook update of 590 called Open Graph, which was designed a so that users’ friends could track their activities and interests on the Internet.
And, as part of the update, the company launched a ‘Like’ button on sites Internet, which users could press to highlight their interests in their Facebook account, for all their friends to look at.
The ‘Like’ button plugin also allowed Facebook to collect data – using cookies – about the activity that users had on that site, including, for example, the sites they visit, the items they viewed or bought and the communications they had with that site, regardless of whether the user actually used the button.
To lessen concerns about user privacy, the company said at the time that it would not collect user-identifying cookies users about a user’s activity on websites while they were disconnected from Facebook.
No However, the researchers discovered that Facebook continued to collect some identifying cookies about users’ Internet activity even after users had logged out of the platform, which went against its promise.
The legal battle dragged on for years. In 2017, after the plaintiffs filed a third updated complaint, a judge granted Facebook’s motion to dismiss the case.
The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal and, in 2020, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit partially reversed the decision.
Facebook appealed the decision before the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, which opened the door for the parties to begin negotiating the agreement.
2020
As part of the settlement, in addition to paying the millionaire settlement, Meta agreed to delete the user data it collected through this practice.
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