Facebook, rebranded as Meta, has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit from 2012 accusing the company of tracking users even after they logged out of their accounts. The settlement was filed on Monday night with the U.S. District Court in San Jose California and also requires Facebook to delete any data that they collected improperly.
In 2012, users accused Facebook of violating federal and state privacy and wiretapping laws by using plug-ins to store cookies that track when they visited outside websites, hence Facebook “like” buttons popping up. The company then allegedly compiled all of the data they received from users’ browsing histories and sold it to advertisers.
The lawsuit had originally been dismissed in June 2017 after a federal judge stated that the plaintiffs failed to show any reasonable expectation of privacy or financial damages suffered. This was before the case was revived by a federal appeals court in April 2020, ruling that Facebook’s data collection indeed created “economic harm” and that this collection required explicit user consent.
The company appealed that decision, but the Supreme Court declined to take the case last year, which left the Ninth Circuit ruling in place.
“Even before the settlement was reached, this litigation had already profoundly improved privacy rights,” the settlement read. “The Ninth Circuit clarified that when personal data is unlawfully copied and monetized, the result is economic harm (not just privacy harm) even if the value of the data in plaintiffs’ hands does not diminish.”
Users who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed Facebook’s “like” from April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, are covered under the settlement. If approved, the settlement would be one of the largest data privacy settlements in U.S. history.
While the toll might be costly, Facebook is no stranger to data privacy lawsuits. Earlier this month, the company was sued by Texas Attorney General Paxton for using biometric data without consumers’ consent.
In another case last year, federal judge also gave approval to another Facebook class action privacy settlement costing them $650 million to be paid among 1.6 million members of the class in Illinois.