If you lived in the United States between May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022 and created an account or were an active Facebook user in that period, the tech giant now christened Meta owes you money… and it could be hundreds to thousands of dollars.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, the US judiciary has given the green light to a settlement between Meta and lawyers for a group of Facebook users that will resolve multiple class-action lawsuits. The document alleges that the platform shared personal information without permission to third parties and failed to control what was done with it.

Meta denied the allegations, but agreed to pay US$725 million to a fund to get the bad publicity off its back. After all, Facebook earned more than US$ 23 billion last year from selling targeted ads to its users, based on the data it collected from them.

As well reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, while final approval of the settlement is not expected until September, the preliminary decision has opened the door for Facebook users in the U.S. who have not yet filed claims to do so.

The amount of money each will receive will depend on three factors: how much will go toward attorneys’ fees and expenses, how many of Facebook’s approximately 240 million registered U.S. users file claims, and how many years they spent on the platform.

Why Facebook owes you money

The proposed settlement would give 25% of the fund to plaintiffs’ lawyers for legal fees, plus an unspecified amount for expenses of the same type. That will leave about $544 million to divide among those who line up to demand their money.

Facebook has been accused many times over the years of collecting personal information and then deploying it in ways users didn’t know about or hadn’t consented to.

The lawsuits covered by the settlement claim that the platform shared or made personal information accessible without permission to third parties, including app developers, business partners, advertisers and data brokers.

The most notorious of these “third parties” was a personality quiz app that collected information from some 270,000 people and, unbeknownst to them, their Facebook friends as well, including some 71 million Americans. The app’s developer sold the data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used the information to try to influence voters.

After the scandal came to light, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion for violating a 2012 order protecting users’ privacy. But that money was received by the Treasury Department, not the millions of users whose privacy was violated.

Who can file claims?

Anyone who was in the U.S. and had an account on the social network between May 24, 2007, and Dec. 22, 2022, can file a claim through an online form or by downloading the form and then mailing it to Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation (1650 Arch Street, Suite 2210, Philadelphia, PA 19103).

Users need only submit their Facebook username, or the phone number or email address associated with their account, along with their contact information and payment option.

The deadline to submit an online claim is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on August 25, 2023. If you mail your form, it must be postmarked by that date.

The court is scheduled to hold a final approval hearing on Sept. 7, hence payments cannot begin until the settlement agreement is approved and attorneys’ fees and expenses are determined.

For the time being, it is known that the agreement proposes to pay US$15,000 to each of the original plaintiffs; the eight named in the settlement will take home about US$120,000.

To divvy up the rest of the money, the settlement administrator will assign claimants one point for each month they had an activated Facebook account during the period covered by the lawsuit. It will calculate how much to pay for each point accumulated.

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