Facebook users in the US can apply for their share of a $ 725 million privacy settlement that the social media platform's parent company Meta agreed to pay last year. Any US resident, who had a Facebook account between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, is eligible to receive the payment. The settlement amount can be claimed by submitting a form online on or before August 25, reported AP.
The settlement is in connection to the case of Facebook allowing its user's personal information to be used by Cambridge Analytica, a firm associated with former US President Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016.
The case came to light in 2018 after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had paid Facebook app developers to get access to nearly 87 million users on the social media platform. The data was used by the company for a targeted campaign in the election run-up that saw Trump taking over as the 45th President of the US.
It is still not clear how much amount an individual user will get as part of the settlement. The larger the pool of claimants, the smaller the settlement amount will be for every individual, given that the total money will be divided among them.
This has not been the only instance of Meta violating data privacy rules. In May this year, the social media company was directed to pay $1.3 billion in settlement for violating European Union data protection rules. The company was also asked to stop the transfer of data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States.
According to The Guardian, the fine was imposed by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) after a legal challenge by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Scherms after Edward Snowden's claim that European users' data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.
The ruling applied to data collected by only Facebook and no other Meta owned platforms like WhatsApp, and Instagram.
