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Facebook will settle a privacy lawsuit for $90 million

Another privacy lawsuit in the books for Meta.

Meta logo displayed on a roadside sign outside the company's headquarters

Facebook is settling a $90 million privacy lawsuit.

Photo: Meta

Meta-owned Facebook will pay $90 million to settle a privacy lawsuit from 2012, according to a preliminary settlement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The decade-old case claimed that Facebook violated federal wiretap laws by using cookies to track users even after they'd logged off the platform. Facebook will delete the data related to the case as part of the settlement. If approved, the settlement would be one of the biggest data privacy-related class action settlements to date.

The case was previously dismissed in 2017, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit brought the lawsuit back in 2020. Facebook tried to bring its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was denied.

The settlement comes one day after Texas filed suit against Meta over allegations of "secretly harvesting" Texans' photos and videos and applying facial recognition capabilities to them in violation of state biometric privacy law.

Nat Rubio-Licht

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.

metafacebookprivacydatacookiesclass-action lawsuitsettlements
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