Facebook Paid $8.5 Million For Fb.com
Melva Simons
The proposed settlement is a result of revelations in 2018 that information of up to 87 million people may have been improperly accessed by the third-party firm, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018. This is the largest recovery ever in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has paid to settle a private class action, the plaintiffs' lawyers said in a court filing Thursday.
According to the Associated Press (AP), the lawsuit stems from the discovery of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica debacle. As reported jointly by the New York Times, the Observer of London, and The Guardian in April 2018, data firm Cambridge Analytica paid a Facebook app developer to gain access to 87 million Facebook users' personal data. The data was converted into detailed voter profiles used to target U.S. voters on behalf of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
The latest lawsuit and settlement is different from the $650 million class action settlement reached with Facebook in Illinois last year, which resulted in hundreds of dollars being paid out to more than a million residents.
How much will you receive? Again, this depends on how much money is left in the $725 million pot after fees and expenses are paid. The agreement also proposes to pay $15,000 to each of the plaintiffs who represented the class; the eight named in the settlement would reduce the pot by $120,000. To divvy up the rest of the money, the settlement administrator will assign claimants one point for each month they had an activated Facebook account during the period covered by the lawsuit. The administrator will add up the points, calculate how much is to be paid per point, then award claimants according to the number of points they accumulated.
The collection of personal data by Cambridge Analytica was first reported in December 2015 by Harry Davies, a journalist for The Guardian. He reported that Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent.[17] Further reports followed in November 2016 by McKenzie Funk for the New York Times Sunday Review,[18] December 2016 by Hannes Grasseger and Mikael Krogerus for the Swiss publication Das Magazin (later translated and published by Vice),[19] in February 2017 by Carole Cadwalladr for The Guardian (starting in February 2017),[20] and in March 2017 by Mattathias Schwartz for The Intercept.[21] According to PolitiFact, in his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump paid Cambridge Analytica in September, October, and November for data on Americans and their political preferences.[22]
In 2016, American senator Ted Cruz hired Cambridge Analytica to aid his presidential campaign.[44] The Federal Election Commission reported that Cruz paid the company $5.8 million in services.[44] Although Cambridge Analytica was not well known at the time, this is when it started to create individual psychographic profiles.[44] This data was then used to create tailored advertisements for each person to sway them into voting for Cruz.[44]
That number is actually much more flexible: Facebook paid $300 million in cash and 23 million shares for Instagram. That means the amount Facebook pays for Instagram will fluctuate depending on Facebook's share price when it goes public.
Interesting Statistics:
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-stories-500-million/
-of-social-2019