is paying to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company shared the personal data of millions of Facebook users. The social media giant is said to have shared the info with
Cambridge Analytica
, the company that supported Donald
Trump
’s 2016 presidential campaign. To settle this lawsuit, Facebook’s parent company agreed to pay $725 million to affected users in late 2022. According to a report by news agency AP, Facebook users in the US only have a month left to apply for their share of the privacy settlement.
How to claim the settlement payment
Facebook users in the US who had an account at any time between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, are eligible to receive a payment. To apply for the settlement, users can fill out a form and submit it online, or print it out and mail it. The deadline to claim the settlement payment is August 25. The report doesn’t confirm the amount of money individual users will receive. Since the money has to be divided among all the affected users, the payment amount will decrease as more users submit valid claims.
Facebook and its legal problems
In 2018, a lawsuit alleged that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist
Steve Bannon
, paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform. This data was then used to target US voters during the 2016 election campaign that made Trump the country’s 45th president.
Before Meta decided to settle the lawsuit, the company’s CEO was grilled by US lawmakers. Moreover, users were also advised to delete their Facebook accounts. Rival platforms like
TikTok
have also stalled Facebook’s growth. Yet, the social media platform still boasts more than 2 billion users worldwide, which includes nearly 250 million in the US.
Apart from the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit, Meta has been under the scanner over data privacy for some time. In May, the EU imposed a record $1.3 billion fine on Meta and ordered it to stop transferring users’ personal information across the Atlantic by October. Moreover, the tech giant’s new micro-blogging app, Threads, has not rolled out in the EU due to privacy concerns.
