Meta will pay $725 million to settle a privacy lawsuit that accused Facebook of sharing users' data with consulting firm Cambridge Analytica

• Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle the Cambridge Analytica privacy lawsuit.
• The suit was filed in 2018 and accused Facebook of illegally sharing user data with the firm.

Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a privacy lawsuit that accused Facebook of illegally sharing user data with a political consulting firm.

The settlement is "the largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action," lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a court filing on Thursday.

The class-action lawsuit was originally filed in 2018 by Facebook users in California. It came after Facebook revealed it had exposed the data of 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica gathered personal information about millions of Facebook users through an external app in 2015. Users took a personality quiz that pulled data from them and their friend's profiles.

Details included their locations and pages they liked, helping the firm to build a psychological profile of users.

Donald Trump's presidential campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica staffers in 2016, per reports.

Facebook was hit with a $5 billion fine in 2019 by the Federal Trade Commission over the scandal. The tech company had been accused of violating a 2012 agreement with the commission in which it promised not to give third parties access to user data without consent.

Facebook has tightened its policies since the case and stopped giving third parties access to data about users through friends, the court filing said.

Meta agreed to settle the lawsuit in August and a month later Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to a six-hour deposition about Cambridge Analytica.

"We pursued a settlement as it's in the best interest of our community and shareholders," A spokesperson at Meta said to Insider. "Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program. We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront."

Lawyers for the plaintiffs told Insider they could not respond further beyond what was in their press release.