Shareholders from Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreesse, and other company officials, among them being the Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years.
The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that the shareholders wished for 11 defendants to use theri personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called “extreme claims”.
2021 was the year when Facebook became Meta. The company was not a defendant and declined to further comment. On its website, the company has also said it has invested billions of dollars into keeping user privacy safe since 2019.
Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, said in a statement, “This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it’s a missed opportunity for public accountability.”
On Wednesday, an expert who also witnessed for the plaintiffs testified about what he called “gaps and weaknesses” in Facebook’s privacy policy, but would also not say if the company had violated the 2012 agreement that Facebook reached with the FTC.
Kint also mentioned, “Facebook has successfully remade the 'Cambridge Analytica' scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unraveling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data," he said. "That reckoning is now left unresolved.”, reported Reuters.
