70 million users' shutdown positioning service is still followed?Meta pays $ 37.5 million in settlement after being complained

Southern Finance All Media Reporter Li Runze Intern Gao Yi Guangzhou Report

Beijing time on August 24th, Facebook's parent company Meta reconciled a collective lawsuit about Facebook's tracking user position with $ 37.5 million.

The preliminary reconciliation plan shows that the collective lawsuit began in 2018. At that time, multiple users filed a lawsuit allegations against Facebook that even if they had closed the Facebook position tracking function on the mobile phone, they still found their own location data when asking for personal information from Facebook, which means that Facebook has been recording their records of their Travel data and specific latitude and longitude coordinates.

The prosecution believes that these user location data is used to send personalized advertisements to users, and during this period, Facebook's advertising revenue has grown rapidly, bringing a lot of income to the company.

Meta tried to reject the lawsuit, but eventually failed. After reviewing internal documents with more than 100,000 pages, the company's choice to pay $ 37.5 million to reach a settlement.

The preliminary reconciliation plan covers American users who have closed the positioning service tracking but still collected location information from January 30, 2015 to April 18, 2018. It is expected that 70 million netizens can submit claims requests through the online form on the website It is required to be divided into compensation from $ 37.5 million, which is equivalent to $ 0.53 per person.

It is understood that the preliminary reconciliation plan has been submitted in the San Francisco Federal Court on Monday, and it is also necessary to obtain a judge's permission. Although Meta agreed to reach a settlement, he denied that he had improper behavior.

A reporter from Southern Finance and Economics sorted out and found that this is not the first time that Meta has been accused of infringing user privacy. On February 26, 2021, Facebook was involved in the "one of the largest privacy lawsuits in history". The case was forced to pay for the collection and storage of user facial digital scanning information and other biological information for suspected of collecting and storing user facial scanning information and other biological information. 650 million US dollars, about RMB 4.2 billion, to resolve this collective lawsuit after 6 years.

Just in early August this year, a new lawsuit in the regional courts in northern California showed that Meta and some American hospitals violated the medical privacy law. With the consent of the information, the use of information collection tools visited the private medical data of millions of people. , And use advertisements on Facebook.

The indictment of the case stated that these hospitals use Meta's Pixel tools that can provide analysis for Facebook and Instagram ads. It is reported that the tool can access the non -public medical service portal protected by passwords and share sensitive health information, and Meta subsequently sells the information to Facebook advertisers.

However, it is worth noting that it is not a minority of a technical giant for privacy issues. For example, Google has been filed by the false shutdown position tracking function; Apple has also been complained in the United States for vocal assistant Siri infringement of user privacy in the United States.

For the key issues in this lawsuit -user privacy is used for targeted advertising, and many large Internet companies have "stepped on the mine". For example, in May this year, Twitter had been ordered to use account security data to form targeted advertisements, and was ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to ask it for a $ 150 million fine.

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