"Meta agrees to pay $90 million to settle lawsuit over Facebook tracking users' online activity", 15 Feb 2022

Facebook (FB)-parent Meta has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a decade-old class action lawsuit over a practice that allowed the social network to track users' activity across the internet, even if they had logged out of the platform.

The settlement…is one of the largest in the history of the social media company, but it's unlikely to impact the bottom line of the $590 billion internet giant. If approved, the agreement will also rank among the 10 largest data privacy class action settlements in the United States…

The case, filed in 2012, dates back to a 2010 update by Facebook called "Open Graph," which was designed to give users' friends a closer look at their activity and interests across the internet. As part of the update, the company launched a "Like" button plug-in on sites across the internet…The "Like" button plug-in also allowed Facebook to gather data, using cookies, about users' activity on that site …

To alleviate privacy concerns, the company said at the time that it would not collect user-identifying cookies about a user's activity on partner websites while they were logged out of Facebook. However, researchers found that Facebook continued to collect some identifying cookies on users' internet activity even after they logged out of the platform, contrary to its promise…

The legal battle dragged on for years. In 2017, after the plaintiffs had submitted a third updated complaint, a judge granted Facebook's motion to dismiss the case. Plaintiffs appealed the dismissal and in 2020, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit partly reversed the decision. Facebook appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case, opening the door for the parties to begin negotiating the settlement.