Zuckerberg settles lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica scandal

AFP | Washington

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Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and other company board members settled a shareholder lawsuit on Thursday concerning decisions made in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.

A trial over the long-running case had just begun on Wednesday, with defendants accused of overpaying the US government in 2019 when they engineered a $5 billion settlement for alleged privacy violations in the scandal.

Sources familiar with the matter confirmed the settlement, without providing details. The settlement comes the same day that Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists and a board member of the company now known as Meta, was to take the stand.

Zuckerberg himself was expected in the Wilmington, Delaware courtroom on Monday. Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel and former Meta top executive Sheryl Sandberg were also expected to face questioning in the court.

Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that was found to have improperly harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users for targeted political advertising, particularly during the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.

The scandal thrust Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular into a political firestorm, leading to major regulatory changes and public scrutiny of tech companies’ data practices.