Facebook to pay $90 Million for Tracking Users Online

• Facebook’s parent company Meta has agreed to pay a settlement of $90 million for a decade-old class-action lawsuit

• The company was accused of tracking users’ activity across the internet, even while they had logged out from the platform

• This is one of the largest settlements in history to be made by a social media company

Meta, Facebook’s parent company has agreed to pay a settlement of $90 million to settle a lawsuit that has gone on for more than a decade.

The social media giant had been accused of tracking users’ activity even after they have logged off the platform. The proposed settlement was signed late on Monday and it requires the approval of the court to become official. If the settlement is approved, it will be one of the biggest data-privacy class-action settlements ever to be made by a company.

The 2012 lawsuit claims that between April 2010 and September 2011, the Meta-owned company violated privacy and wiretapping laws by using plug-ins to store cookies and track users when they visited third-party websites that contained “like buttons.” The social media company only had users’ permission to track them only while they were logged in but it also did when they logged out.

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Asides from the $90 million, which will be distributed among affected users, the settlement requires that Facebook delete all information that was collected from users through this illegal monitoring practice.

This comes a year after the social media giant agreed to pay $650 million for another privacy lawsuit where it violated an Illinois law.

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