Meta, a Mark Zuckerberg company, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of allowing millions of its users’ personal information to be harvested for political reasons, IgbereTV reports
Facebook had in 2016 supplied its data to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign.
Meta Platforms, which is the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, was in court late Thursday to receive the judgment.
The Terms of the settlement reached were disclosed in court documents filed, however subjected to approval by a judge in a San Francisco federal court hearing set for March.
Backstory:
In 2018, two years after the US presidential election that brought in Donald Trump as president of the United States, news filtered that it was discovered that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform.
Upon investigation, it was discovered that the pack of data harvested was used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that gave Trump an added advantage during the polls.
