Meta has agreed to pay $31.85 million to settle a lawsuit in Australia aimed at the high-profile Cambridge Analytica data breach controversy.
Meta was taken to court in May 2022 by the Australian privacy watchdog, which said that personal data of more than 300,000 Australian Facebook users was “exposed to the risk of being disclosed”.
However, now that the lawsuit has been settled, there will be no investigation into the past practices of Meta, according to the company.
Australian Information Commissioner Elizabeth Tydd, on the other hand, says, “Today’s settlement represents the largest ever payment dedicated to addressing concerns about the privacy of individuals in Australia.”
In March 2023, the Commission successfully convinced the Australian high court not to entertain any appeals from Meta. This played an important role in the watchdog’s investigation into Meta’s data breaches.
The violations were first reported by British publication the Guardian in 2018. Meta’s biggest and most profound privacy controversy to date, the Cambridge Analytica fiasco had taken the world by storm. Investigations unearthed that Meta, previously known as Facebook Inc., let Cambridge Analytica — a now defunct British political consultancy — in on the personal data of nearly 87 million (initially reported to be 50 million) of its users.
The data was allegedly harvested to build voter profiles for US president Donald Trump, whose then aide Stephen K Bannon was a board member at Cambridge Analytica at the time the breaches were taking place. This data was believed to have been misused to influence the outcome of 2016 presidential elections and the Brexit vote.
Meta paid a record-breaking $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) following the massive data breaches.
