Facebook Agrees to Pay $90 Million to Settle Decade-Old Privacy Violation Case

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit
over the company’s use of cookies to allegedly track Facebook
users’ internet activity even after they had logged off from the
platform.

In addition, the social media company will be required to delete
all of the data it illegally collected from those users. The
development was first reported by Variety^[1].

The decade-old case, filed in 2012, centered around Facebook’s
use of the proprietary “Like” button to track users as they visited
third-party websites – regardless of whether they actually used the
button – in violation of the federal wiretapping laws, and then
allegedly compiling those browsing histories into profiles for
selling the information to advertisers.

Based on the terms of the proposed settlement, users who browsed
non-Facebook websites that included the “Like” button between April
22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, will be covered.

“Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade
old, is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders
and we’re glad to move past this issue,” a spokesperson for Meta
was quoted as saying to Variety.

The development comes a year after Meta was ordered to pay $650 million^[2]
to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused Facebook of violating
the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) over its use
of facial recognition to tag users in photos without their explicit
consent.

The settlement also arrives as the company has entangled itself
in yet another privacy lawsuit from the U.S. state of Texas, which
earlier this week^[3]
sued Meta for “capturing and using the biometric data of millions
of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do
so.”