Zuckerberg, Meta Executives Settle $8 Billion Privacy Lawsuit

Mark Zuckerberg, along with current and former Meta Platforms executives, have reached a confidential settlement to end an $8 billion lawsuit filed by investors, Reuters is reporting.

The class-action accused top Meta figures, including Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Sheryl Sandberg, and others, of orchestrating repeated privacy breaches that allegedly cost the company billions.

The case revolved around allegations that Zuckerberg and other Meta board members had failed in their duty to protect user privacy. Shareholders claimed that these directors knowingly allowed Facebook to violate a 2012 consent decree issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which required the company to put in place stronger safeguards for user data.

One of the central violations, they argued, was the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the personal data of tens of millions of users was harvested without their consent and exploited for political targeting.

In 2019, Facebook paid a record $5 billion penalty to the FTC over these privacy issues. That same year, it also reached a $725 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by affected users. Shareholders now contended that these penalties should have been paid personally by the directors and executives responsible for the failures rather than by the company itself.

The trial officially began on July 16, with opening statements and initial witness testimony, including from current White House Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, who previously served on Meta’s board. Zients stated that the board believed resolving the FTC case without implicating Zuckerberg personally was in the company’s best interest.

While Meta has not commented on the settlement, the company has previously insisted that it has invested billions to improve its data practices.