Facebook forced to pay $90MILLION to users after ‘tracking people once they’d logged off’ – are you due a payout?
META has agreed to shell out $90million to settle a decade-old lawsuit alleging that Facebook tracked users after they logged off.
The agreement was filed Monday in a California court and if approved by a judge would put to rest one of the series of suits alleging the social media giant invaded users' privacy.
The fee agreed by Meta – Facebook's parent company – will be distributed among affected users in the United States.
It's unclear how many people may be owed a payout.
"Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interest of our community," Meta's Drew Pusateri told AFP.
"We're glad to move past this issue."
The suit alleged the social media giant violated privacy guidelines by tracking its users' visits to outside web pages that contained Facebook "like" buttons in order to better target ads.
That tracking contradicted assurances given by Facebook at the time, according to court filings.
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The suit, which consolidated state and federal litigation, represented people who had active Facebook accounts between early 2010 and late 2011.
Facebook was able to tell when someone loaded a page embedded with its content, such as a "like" button.
The company could then link the data back to users' profiles, according to legal filings.
The issue raised in the suit was addressed and is no longer impacting Facebook users, according to the social network.
The proposed settlement calls for Meta to pay $90million into a claims fund and delete all data the suit argued was wrongly collected.
The case had been winding its way through lower courts since 2012 and last year the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
Back then, missteps over user privacy were among Facebook's biggest troubles.
In the years since, though, issues of misinformation, hate speech and threats to democracy have been added to the mix.
Lawyers for the case said the settlement is one of the 10 largest data-privacy settlements in U.S. history.
But it is a fraction of Facebook's $650million settlement of a privacy lawsuit last year.
In that case, the lawsuit claimed that Facebook used photo face-tagging and other biometric data without the permission of its users.
Meta and other US internet giants are in the crosshairs of privacy advocates, users and regulators regarding how they use people's data and software "cookies" that track online behaviour.
In other news, a British woman has told of her horror after scammers used photos of a "silver fox" politician to trick her out of £80,000.
Norfolk County Council is suing Apple over what it says was misleading information about iPhone sales.
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