Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of May 11, Beijing time, a US judge ruled that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, and other directors must face charges from investors, including the former US president who hired Cambridge Analytics in the UK during the election campaign to collect the privacy data of tens of millions of users of the Facebook platform, known as the Cambridge Analytics scandal.

Judge Travis Laster of the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled on Wednesday that society could no longer trust Meta's board of directors to investigate repeated breaches of promises and violations of user privacy by Meta management because of conflicts of interest.

Lester said that when it comes to protecting privacy, Meta's then board of directors has been acting improperly or ignoring problems, and there have been clear signs of invading users' privacy within the company, but the board has failed to do so.

Meta paid a fine of $5 billion after the Cambridge Analytics scandal was exposed and was investigated by the US government.

It has been revealed that Cambridge Analytics obtained privacy data indirectly from a researcher who collected Meta user privacy data through a third-party polling tool. In addition to users' private data, the polling software also collects data from relatives and friends, involving tens of millions of Meta users.

The plaintiff accused

Meta later investigated the scandal and found that Cambridge Analytics improperly obtained the private information of at least 50 million Meta users, according to legal documents filed by plaintiff investors.

Late last year, Meta agreed to settle and pay $725 million in damages in an investor lawsuit in California over the Cambridge Analytics scandal.

Meta spokesman David Arnold (Dave Arnold) declined to comment on the latest Delaware court ruling.

The Cambridge Analytics scandal dealt a huge blow to Meta's reputation, and at the time, Meta was already mired in another crisis of confidence, allowing Russian institutions to take advantage of loopholes in the Facebook platform to publish information to influence the 2016 US presidential election, and Meta came under fire.

The plaintiffs pointed out that the Facebook platform had violated users' privacy four years before the Cambridge Analytics scandal was exposed.

The plaintiffs claimed that as early as 2012, the Federal Trade Commission investigated and found that the Facebook platform violated privacy. That year, the agency signed a privacy agreement with Meta. Four months after the agreement was signed, the Commission found that the Facebook platform had cancelled an information disclosure that the content shared by users and other friends might be collected by other software used by those friends. Although the disclosure is stopped, this kind of privacy collection continues.

Make a profit

The plaintiffs pointed out that Meta's board connived at privacy violations to allow the company to make money by advertising and selling personal data, and that they were not interested in implementing privacy promises.

The plaintiff said in court documents that Meta's complete failure in corporate governance led the company to be investigated by the US government, wiped out its market value, faced millions of dollars in fines and other fees, and was investigated by many countries around the world.

In the ruling, Judge Lester also referred to another message described by the plaintiffs that Meta had promised to pay a higher fine to the FTC in order to keep Zuckerberg from personal responsibility in the investigation. Some investors believe Meta has paid an extra $2 billion to protect Zuckerberg. Judge Lester said that if the plaintiff's charge is true, then Meta's board of directors will be found guilty of wasting the company's assets.

Lester also said that some security experts within Meta had warned board members, including US venture capital mogul Mark Anderson and Peter Thiel, about the invasion of privacy. The board took no action and was indifferent when the executive in charge of computer security was fired.

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