Meta has agreed to pay $725M to settle the Cambridge Analytica data leak case. The lawsuit has been ongoing since 2018 and has had severe consequences for the special media giant's reputation regarding privacy.
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- The lawsuit claimed that Facebook allowed third-party apps used by Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information without their consent for political advertising.
- The data leak was first reported in 2018. The way this data was extracted was through a personality quiz app called "thisisyourdigitallife," which collected users' public profiles, page likes, dates of birth, genders, locations, and even messages to build their psychographic profiles.
- The app was used only by 30,000 users, but the dataset was found to contain information on 87 million Facebook users.
- This campaign was infamously involved in the 2016 presidential elections and became the center of discussion regarding the manipulation of the U.S. voter base by Russia.
- Cambridge Analytica has since declared bankruptcy and is now defunct.