Facebook parent agrees to pay $725 million to settle privacy suit

Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running lawsuit that accused the social network of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users' private data.

The amount was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday.

"The proposed settlement of $725,000,000 is the largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action," lawyers for the plaintiffs said in the filing.

Facebook has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which must still be approved by a judge in the San Francisco division in the US District Court.

It was reported in August that Facebook had reached a preliminary agreement, although the amount and terms of the settlement were not then announced.

The lawsuit was initiated in 2018, when Facebook users accused the social network of violating privacy rules by sharing their data with third parties that included the British firm Cambridge Analytica, which had been linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, which has since shut down, then collected and exploited the personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent, the lawsuit alleged.