Meta faces $8 billion trial over claims of privacy violations under Mark Zuckerberg’s watch
Mark Zuckerberg faces a pivotal $8 billion trial that will test claims Meta’s leaders violated user privacy and accountability laws in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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Mark Zuckerberg is set to take the stand this week in a rare $8 billion shareholder trial that will scrutinize Meta’s handling of user data in the years leading up to and following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The trial centers on allegations that Facebook’s leadership, including Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, violated a 2012 Federal Trade Commission agreement to protect user privacy, operating the social media giant as what shareholders claim was an illegal enterprise, as per a Reuters report.
Shareholders, including individual investors and major pension funds such as California’s State Teachers' Retirement System, allege that Facebook continued to allow user data to be harvested without consent, despite repeated assurances to regulators and the public. The plaintiffs argue that Zuckerberg and others should reimburse Meta for more than $8 billion in fines and costs, including the FTC’s record $5 billion fine in 2019, tied to privacy violations revealed in the Cambridge Analytica fallout.
The Reuter report stated that the trial is expected to run eight days and will revisit boardroom decisions from a decade ago to determine whether Facebook’s leaders knowingly failed in their duty of oversight.
The defendants, who include venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, have rejected the claims as “extreme” and argue the company invested heavily in privacy compliance and was misled by Cambridge Analytica’s “studied deceit.”
Among the allegations, shareholders also claim that Zuckerberg sold billions in stock ahead of the Cambridge Analytica scandal’s public revelation, allegedly reaping over $1 billion in profit while knowing the crisis would hit the stock price. Zuckerberg’s legal team counters that the sales were conducted under a prearranged trading plan and aimed to fund his philanthropic initiatives, the report added.
