U.S. Facebook Users Can Now Claim Their Part of $725MM Settlement
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If you’re a Facebook user residing in the United States who had an active Facebook account anytime from May 2007 to December 2022 you can now apply for your piece of the $725 million financial settlement that Meta paid in order to settle the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal class action lawsuit. You can submit your claim by visiting the Facebook User Privacy Settlement website, now through August 25.
To claim your (likely very small) piece of the settlement pie, you’ll be required to provide various bits of personal information, including your name, address, phone number, and bits of information about your Facebook account. You’ll also need to select how you’d like to receive the payment. Payment options include Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, or a prepaid Mastercard.
Since the amount claimants will receive from the fund will depend on how many claimants file for the payment, as well as how long they’ve been on Facebook, the received amount will likely be quite small. As usual, the lawyers will be the only ones to get rich from a lawsuit like this.
The class action suit was due to a 2018 revelation that Facebook allowed UK political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access user data from as many as 87 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used the data to profile and target voters on behalf of various political campaigns during the 2016 campaign season. The information was shared with business partners, advertisers, third-party app developers, and data brokers with no Facebook oversight.
A 2015 quiz app developed jointly by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge Analytica collected data, not only about Facebook users who actually took the quiz but also users that were connected friends on the social network. This allowed Cambridge Analytica to create voter profiles connected to approximately 71 million U.S. residents.
An app called “This Is Your Digital Life” helped build the data collection. The app told Facebook users that the results of the survey would only be used for academic use.
Meta’s $725 million settlement payment is the largest payout ever seen in a United States data privacy case. The amount is also the most that the company has paid to settle a lawsuit.
As is traditional in settlements like this, Meta does not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement, which is subject to the approval of a federal judge. Meta still faces a possible lawsuit from the attorney general for Washington, DC, as well as investigations by state attorneys general.
Facebook was also required by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to pay a $5 billion fine related to the privacy scandal back in July 2019.
What Information You Need to Provide
- Your name
- Your address
- Your email
- Your phone
- If you resided in the U.S. between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022
- If you were a Facebook user between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022
- If you deleted your account in that period, the date range when you were a Facebook user
- Your Facebook user name
- The payment service you prefer, e.g. prepaid Mastercard, PayPal, or Venmo
How Long Does it Take to Fill Out the Form?
It will take only 5 minutes.
This information first appeared on Mactrast.com
