Facebook settling privacy lawsuit for $90M

Facebook will pay $90 million to settle a privacy lawsuit dating back to 2012, according to a proposed settlement filed Monday night. 

The preliminary settlement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ends a decade-long case against Facebook over allegations of the tech giant using “cookies” to track users’ internet use even after they logged off the social media platform. 

As part of the proposed settlement, Facebook, now under the parent company Meta, also agreed to sequester and delete all the data at issue. 

“Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders and we’re glad to move past this issue,” Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement. 

The case had been dismissed in 2017, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit revived the lawsuit in 2020. 

Facebook appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court declined to hear the company’s appeal of the lower court ruling. 

If approved, the settlement would be among the top 10 data privacy and data breach class action settlements. That list is currently topped by a previous Facebook settlement for $650 million that a judge approved last year in a class-action lawsuit against the company’s facial recognition technology. 

Meta is facing another case over its use of facial recognition in Texas. The state filed a data privacy complaint against Meta on Monday over facial recognition technology the company has since ceased using. 

A Meta spokesperson called the claims in the Texas suit “without merit” and said the company will “defend ourselves vigorously.”