Plaintiffs Question Scope Of Facebook’s $90M Privacy Settlement

A group of plaintiffs’ lawyers has raised questions about the scope of Meta’s pending $90 million privacy settlement in California federal court, telling a judge that their allegations in a separate antitrust case should be carved out and not swept up into the deal.

The attorneys at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan said in a court filing on Monday they were concerned that broad language in the privacy settlement could be used to thwart pending antitrust claims in front of another judge in California’s Northern US District Court.

The privacy settlement would resolve claims that Facebook tracked users’ web activity even after they had logged out of the social media website. In the antitrust case, Facebook is accused of exploiting user data to curb competition. The case also involves the company’s data collection practices.

The data privacy settlement announced in February “risks providing a benefit to common defendant Meta Platforms Inc for which it did not bargain and to which it is not entitled,” lawyers for the antitrust plaintiffs said in Monday’s court filing.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys asked US District Judge Edward Davila to include a sentence in the privacy settlement that says the resolution of the dispute does not limit the claims alleged in the antitrust litigation.

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