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Facebook’s parent company has reached a preliminary settlement in a lawsuit alleging that the world’s largest social networking service forwarded millions of users’ personal information to Cambridge Analytica, a company that backed Donald Trump’s victorious 2016 presidential campaign.
The terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company of Facebook and Instagram, were not disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court sought a 60-day adjournment of the action while lawyers finalize the settlement. That timeline suggested that further details could be announced by the end of October.
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Facebook’s Meta logo will be on display at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on October 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File/AP Newsroom)
The deal was reached just weeks before a Sept. 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his longtime chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to statements during the final stages of evidence gathering ahead of the trial, according to court documents.
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 as a student at Harvard University, could have been turned off for up to six hours. Sandberg, who is stepping down as Chief Operating Officer after 14 years, could have been questioned for up to five hours.
The case arose from revelations in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica, a company associated with Trump’s political strategist Stephen Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer to access the personal information of approximately 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target American voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Trump’s election as the 45th president.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg | Getty Images
The worrying uproar led to a repentant Zuckerberg being roasted by lawmakers at a high-profile congressional hearing and urging people to delete their Facebook accounts. While Facebook’s growth has stalled as more people connect and enjoy themselves on competing services like TikTok, the social network still has about 2 billion users worldwide, including nearly 200 million in the US and Canada.
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The lawsuit, which had sought to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had alleged that the privacy breach proved Facebook is a “data broker and surveillance company” as well as a social network.
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