Meta agrees to pay $90Million to settle lawsuit against privacy concerns

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has agreed to pay $90 million to resolve a ten-year class action lawsuit over a system that allowed the social network to follow users’ online activities long after they had signed out.

The settlement, which was announced on Tuesday, is one of the largest in the company’s history, but it’s unlikely to have an influence on the $590 billion internet giant’s bottom line. According to DiCello Levitt Gutzler, one of the law firms engaged in filing the complaint, if authorised, the compensation will be among the top ten biggest data privacy class action settlements in the United States.

Between April 2010 and September 2011, Facebook allegedly breached privacy and wiretapping laws by employing plug-ins to keep cookies monitoring users’ visits to third-party websites with “like” buttons, according to the 2012 complaint. Users gave their consent for the social networking site to track them while they were signed in, but it promised to stop once they logged out.

“Resolving this dispute, which has been ongoing for more than a decade, is in the best interests of our community and our stockholders, and we’re delighted to be moving past this problem,” a Meta representative told sources.

To alleviate concerns about privacy, Facebook claimed at the time that it would not collect user-identifying cookies regarding a user’s behaviour on partner websites while they were signed out of Facebook.