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Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Friday is the last day for Facebook users to file claims for cash payments in the $725 million Meta settlement over privacy violations in the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit. Claims can be filed up to 11:59 p.m. Friday online. If using U.S. Mail, the downloaded claim form has to be postmarked by Aug. 25.
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The only way to get a cash payment from this settlement is to submit a timely and properly completed claim form and have the claim approved by the settlement administrator.
Five years ago Facebook revealed that 87 million user profiles had been data scraped and given to Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct pro-Trump political consulting company co-founded by Steve Bannon.
The settlement includes all Facebook users between May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022. It was reached in a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
The court has scheduled a final aprroval hearing in this case for Sept. 7.
Shortly after the privacy breach was made public executives for Cambridge Analytica were exposed on surveillance footage discussing bribes and other various schemes designed to help Trump and other political candidates.
While Meta legally did not admit liability for the privacy violations in the class-action lawsuit.
"We pursued a settlement as it's in the best interest of our community and shareholders," a Meta spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. "We are notifying people through their Facebook notifications about this settlement so they can decide whether to participate."
In May Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta $1.3 billion for privacy violations and ordered the company to stop transferring data from the EU to the United States by October.
In March 2019 Facebook confirmed it had stored hundreds of millions of account passwords without encryption in plain, searchable text and that thousands of employees had access to the data.
