san francisco The Facebook group Meta is catching up with its past. The company reached a $90 million settlement to avert a class action lawsuit that was around a decade old.
The settlement has been brought before the US District Court for the Northern District of California for approval. The background was a function that allowed the platform to track users through the Internet even after they had logged out. A final decision by the court is still pending.
The lawsuit, filed in 2012, concerns a feature introduced by Facebook in 2010 called “Open Graph”. This allowed website operators to include the “Like” button in their offers. This should give users the opportunity to express their preferences.
>> Read about this: The hype surrounding the Metaverse will result in billions of dollars being spent on nonsense
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
However, the functionality went far beyond that, according to the court documents. The “Like” button enabled Facebook to use cookies to collect data about the activities of users on relevant websites – such as which websites they visited, which articles they viewed or which products they bought and how they communicated with the website in question had. However, this function was not limited to whether the button was actually used.
Facebook initially denied the practice
Facebook had always emphasized that user data would not be recorded if users had logged out of the platform. However, computer expert Nik Cubrilovic proved that Facebook continued to track logged-out users across the Internet. After the group had initially described Cubrilovic’s representation as a false statement, the company admitted a mistake and stopped the practice. A court case ensued that dragged on for a decade.
The comparison now reached applies to US Facebook users who had an account between April 22, 2010 and September 26, 2011 and visited non-Facebook websites on which the “Like” button was displayed. As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to delete user data collected through this practice.
In a statement, Meta said, “Settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interests of our community and our shareholders, and we are pleased to put this issue behind us.”
Stephen Grygiel, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said: “This is a real wake-up call for internet and advertising companies that collect user data and use advanced browser tracking.”
Meta employees should call themselves “Metamates”.
At an internal meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the company’s future strategy. Insiders reported that the metaverse as a digital world is a central element of the company’s growth strategy. In addition, Zuckerberg has revised the company’s guidelines: the company slogan “Move fast” is now “Move fast together”. Years ago, Zuckerberg said goodbye to the motto “Move fast and break things”.
In addition, Zuckerberg asked the workforce to see themselves as “metamates” in the future. The company value will apply in the future: “Meta, metamates, me”. The slogan is based on a naval idiom, explained meta manager Andrew “Boz” Bosworth on the short message service Twitter.
Mark Zuckerberg’s group is currently heavily criticized. The company was recently severely punished on the stock exchange when the quarterly figures were presented, when Zuckerberg had to admit that the number of users had fallen for the first time in the company’s history. During the past four months, the company had lost more than 40 percent of its stock market valuation.
More: billion dollar market or billion dollar grave? What the Metaverse is really capable of.