Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach lawsuit ends in 11th hour settlement

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Facebook has dramatically agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica access to the private data of tens of millions of users, four years after the Observer exposed the scandal that mired the tech giant in repeated controversy.

It emerged that Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who recently announced she would be stepping down in the autumn, would face questioning, with the depositions scheduled to take place from 20 September.

The latest developments follow a separate lawsuit last year that claimed Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Zuckerberg.

In the new court filing, disclosed late on Friday, financial terms or details of the preliminary settlement are not given.

The Observer asked Facebook and its lawyers to share more details of the in-principle settlement but it declined to respond.

However, the filing does ask the judge in the San Francisco federal court to put the class action lawsuit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalise a written settlement.

The four-year-old lawsuit, brought by a group of Facebook users, alleged that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing personal data of users with other firms such as Cambridge Analytica, which declared itself bankrupt two months after the Observer exposé.

It was thought that Meta could have been made to pay hundreds of millions of dollars had it lost the case.