Zuckerberg avoids Cambridge Analytica deposition as Facebook agrees to settle
Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
It's been four years since users alleging harm caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal sued Facebook (now Meta) for selling tons of easily identifying personal information to third parties, allegedly doing so even when users thought they had denied consent. In 2018, plaintiffs alleged in a consolidated complaint that Facebook acted in astonishingly reckless" ways and did almost nothing" to protect users from the potential harms of this intentionally" obscured massive data market. The company, they said, put 87 million users at a substantial and imminent risk of identity theft, fraud, stalking, scams, unwanted texts, emails, and even hacking." And users' only option to avoid these risks was to set everything on Facebook to private-so even friends wouldn't see their activity.
Because of Facebook's allegedly deceptive practices, plaintiffs said that Facebook users suffered concrete injury in ways that transcend a normal data breach injury." Plaintiffs had gotten so far in court defending these claims that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand for six hours this September, along with lengthy depositions scheduled for former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and current Meta Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan. However, it looks like none of those depositions will be happening now.
On Friday, a joint motion was filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It confirmed that the plaintiffs and Facebook had reached a settlement agreement that seems to have finally ended the class action lawsuit that Meta had previously said it hoped would be over by March 2023.