Cambridge Analytica: Mark Zuckerberg signs settlement to avoid “$8 billion lawsuit”

“It’s a last-minute deal” that will prevent “Mark Zuckerberg and a host of other tech billionaires from having to testify in an $8 billion lawsuit over Facebook users’ privacy violations,” The Times reports .

Mark Zuckerberg and some Facebook directors at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, including Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, “were due to appear in a Delaware court for their involvement on Facebook’s board when the company was fined $5 billion.”

The social network was convicted of deliberately breaching a user confidentiality agreement, which led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the British conservative daily continues.

Eleven people were due to appear in court, including Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, its 2018 director Jeffrey Zients, and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and could be ordered to pay " more than $8 billion" in damages, the BBC reports .

But on Thursday, July 17, at the start of the second day of the trial, "Mark Zuckerberg accepted a settlement," the amount of which remains "unclear" for the time being, explains the British public media.

The complaint dates back to 2018, when the case broke that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, “which worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign and had accessed the data of millions of Facebook users,” the social network with billions of users, had simply leaked personal data in total violation of its privacy rules.

According to Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, “a proper trial would have provided a full accounting of how Facebook came to adopt and endorse illegal practices.”