Facebook Begins Sending Settlement Payments from Cambridge Analytica Scandal Soon (cnn.com) 30
"Facebook users who filed a claim in parent company Meta's $725 million settlement related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal may soon get a payment," reports CNN, since "on August 27, the court ordered that settlement benefits be distributed."
It's been over two years since Facebook users were able to file claims in Meta's December 2022 settlement. The class-action lawsuit began after the social media giant said in 2018 that as many as 87 million Facebook users' private information was obtained by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica...
Meta was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, including developers, advertisers and data brokers, to access private information about Facebook users. The social media giant was also accused of insufficiently managing third-party access to and use of user data. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. Following the Cambridge Analytica incident, Facebook restricted third-party access to user data and "developed more robust tools" to inform users about how data is collected and shared, according to court documents...
Any US Facebook user who had an active account between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, was eligible to file a claim, even if they have deleted the account. The deadline to file was August 25, 2023. Almost 29 million claims were filed and about 18 million were validated as of September 2023, according to Meta's response in a 2024 legal document... Payments will either be sent directly to the bank account provided on the claim form, or via PayPal, a virtual prepaid Mastercard, Venmo or Zelle. Unsuccessful or expired payments will receive a "second chance email" to update the payment method.
Meta was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, including developers, advertisers and data brokers, to access private information about Facebook users. The social media giant was also accused of insufficiently managing third-party access to and use of user data. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. Following the Cambridge Analytica incident, Facebook restricted third-party access to user data and "developed more robust tools" to inform users about how data is collected and shared, according to court documents...
Any US Facebook user who had an active account between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, was eligible to file a claim, even if they have deleted the account. The deadline to file was August 25, 2023. Almost 29 million claims were filed and about 18 million were validated as of September 2023, according to Meta's response in a 2024 legal document... Payments will either be sent directly to the bank account provided on the claim form, or via PayPal, a virtual prepaid Mastercard, Venmo or Zelle. Unsuccessful or expired payments will receive a "second chance email" to update the payment method.
The price of doing business (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Pay to the order of....Mrs Wilbur Starks.... One dollar and NINE CENTS!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHmXja12Vy4 [youtube.com]
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The penalties should scale with the size of the crime and those people who made these decisions should be held personally accountable. It's time to end the upper class shield of limited or no liability for those who profits from criminals enterprises. This is exactly what classism looks like.
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Could Facebook afford that?
Brexit is costing the UK at least 4% of GDP, every year. It probably won't be undone this decade, if ever before the UK breaks up.
That's £145 billion per year, every year, just in economic losses. The actual damage to people's lives, especially young people's in terms of lost opportunities, greater poverty and suffering, over their lifetimes, is difficult to calculate but must be more billions per year.
In 2023 Facebook only made about $30 billion in profit. They can't
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they should be held fully accountable and so should the senior managers, the owner and the shareholders
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That’s one whole grocery bag today!
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Wow. A whole $40 for having your data passed to illicit election meddlers without your consent!
More like $30 after the various fees are paid out (the lawyers alone are getting $180M for their efforts).
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it (Score:5, Informative)
The date on that article is 1999. Privacy has gotten significantly less private in the last 26 years, since he said that.
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yeah well dont read twitter right now
cancel culture and free speech are no longer republican issues, theyve flipped on those ideals as we all knew they would as soon as they had an oppurtunity.
they love cancelling for speech now!
Slow justice is no justice (Score:5, Insightful)
The scandal broke in 2018. Facebook has been fighting this thing for 7 years. There was never a question about whether it happened, or whether they were complicit. They were simply using lawyers to tie up the settlement in court, biding their time. People have forgotten about the scandal and moved on. Nothing has changed, and now Facebook will throw a little money at it to make it go away. Meanwhile, they continue to sell your data to whoever will pay for it, having made only minor tweaks to their system to satisfy the lawyers.
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There was never a question about whether it happened, or whether they were complicit.
Well, given that Alexander Nix was never personally fined, I'd say are still reluctant to say Facebook and Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong at all.
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It is not like they didn't find new safer ways to do similar things in the 2024 election and they probably did! You think this time they had whistleblowers to catch them this time? Everybody knows it would be so much worse for anybody who spoke out now compared to back then. Plus Russia was more involved this time around and not buying silly ads on facebook like they did in 2016... we know they did buy influencers this last time.
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I’m no fan of facebook, but they’re being forced to shell out a billion dollars for something that thousands of companies and orgs are doing nowada
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Why should they be the only ones to pay up when literally every player in the room has the same dirt on their hands?
Every other player in the room is doing this now because they saw that there was little or no repercussions for Facebook. Yeah, a $725 million fine is some penalty, but that's peanuts to them for what they got out of it.
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No, this should NOT be dropped for the sake of consistency.
"There's so much shoplifting going on, and we only catch a few. We should just stop worrying about shoplifting."
No. How about we enforce the law instead!
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This is like trying to outlaw and punish gum-
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I think you have been misinformed about the nature of the scandal. There's some good reading in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No, it was not just "scraping the web."
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My issues with your use of the word "scrape" is that it implies that Facebook was not complicit. Facebook did explicitly provide the data to Cambridge Analytica via its API. It was *not* a case of CA secretly retrieving data that Facebook did not intend to provide.
I do agree with you on the pervasiveness of this kind of data sharing. My only issue is your characterization of Facebook as being an unwitting victim of Cambridge Analytica.
How do I file for my shadow profile? (Score:5, Interesting)
Enjoy your $30 check (Score:2)
Don't spend it all in one place.
Not a complete loss (Score:4, Interesting)
now they can put your bank account on file