The Delaware trial was adjourned after the settlement was reached, with no details disclosed.
Defendants, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, avoided testifying under oath.
The lawsuit marked the first Caremark claim to go to trial over corporate oversight failure.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a group of company directors, both current and former, have agreed to settle a major shareholder lawsuit that sought $8 billion in damages over Facebook’s historical mishandling of user privacy. This comes when the high profile trial was set to enter its second day in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
SurveyAccording to Reuters, the court adjourned without a comment from the defence. However, the specifics of the settlement have been kept under wraps. The lawsuit accused Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and board members such as Marc Andreessen, of allowing repeated privacy breaches, which resulted in massive regulatory fines, including a $5 billion penalty from the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019.
The case revolved around Caremark claims, a rare and difficult legal path under Delaware law that holds directors accountable for failing to monitor company compliance. This was the first time such claims made it to trial. Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other prominent figures, including Peter Thiel and Reed Hastings, were expected to testify.
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By settling, the defendants avoided having to testify under oath, the report added. Sandberg was sanctioned during pretrial proceedings for deleting potentially relevant emails, which could have hampered her testimony, the report continued. The plaintiffs claimed that Facebook’s leadership knowingly oversaw a business model based on extensive data collection and violated a 2012 FTC agreement designed to protect user data, it mentioned.
The lawsuit stemmed from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from millions of Facebook users was harvested without their consent for political profiling. The revelations have sparked intense scrutiny of Facebook’s data practices and regulatory oversight.
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Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
