Facebook has not recognized any offense, in the words of this agreement, made public Thursday, which is still approved by a judge.
mo12345lemonde with AFP and reuters
The agreement was expected, but the amount was so far unknown: the American giant Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, agreed to pay $ 725 million (684 million euros) for End the trial launched against him in 2018. Damages were claimed from the social network, accused of having left third parties, including the British company Cambridge Analytica, access the private data of users.
“The 725 million proposed by the agreement constitute the highest amount ever reached in a collective name on private data and never paid by Facebook to end” this type of prosecution, said lawyers for Defense in a legal document filed with a court in San Francisco, published Thursday evening December 22 and posted by the Reuters agency . Facebook has not recognized any offense, under the terms of this agreement, which must still be approved by a judge of this same court.
The conclusion of a preliminary agreement had been announced in August, without its amount or its exact terms being then revealed. He had intervened then that Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, his director general, Sheryl Sandberg (who announced his resignation in June), as well as the latter’s successor, Javier Olivan, had to testify in justice in September as part of this scandal. These hearings therefore did not take place.
a fine of $ 5 billion in 2019
In a procedure initiated in 2018, Facebook users accused the social network of having violated the rules for the protection of privacy by revealing their data to third parties including the Cambridge Analytica firm, linked to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.
This British company, which has closed since, had collected and operated, without their consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to which the platform had given it access. This information would have been used to develop software used to guide the vote of American voters in favor of Donald Trump.
In July 2019, the federal authorities imposed a fine of $ 5 billion on Facebook for having “cheated” its users and imposed an independent control of its management of personal data. Hearing that year by Congress members, Mark Zuckerberg had assured that he had discovered the extent of the problem with the publication of first information in the press. The publication Tuesday, for the first time, a testimony of the CEO , carried out that same year with the American market gendarme (Securities and Exchange Commission, dry), lets him hear that the boss de Meta was aware of 2017 potential damage that Cambridge Analytica could cause
Since the outbreak of the scandal, Facebook has deleted access to its data to thousands of applications, suspected of abusing it, restricts the amount of information accessible to developers in general and ease, for users, The calibration of restrictions on sharing personal data. Critics targeting Facebook have not stopped. In 2021, the “Facebook Files”, thousands of internal documents revealed by a whistleblower, showed the flaws in the regulation of the powerful American social network.