Facebook parent company Meta has reached a $37.5 million (over €37.7 million) settlement with the US government. Facebook has been accused of violating users’ privacy by tracking their location through smartphones without permission.
By our technical editorsUsers have turned off the ‘tracking’ option on their mobile devices. Although they didn’t want to share their location with Facebook, they said the company found out where they were from their IP address. Facebook then uses that information to target users and send them ads.
The settlement applies to people in the US who used Facebook after the end of January 2015. Despite the settlement, Meta insists he did nothing wrong.
The documents were filed on Monday evening in a San Francisco court in the US state of California. The settlement is not yet fully finalized: the judge’s official approval is still required.
Meta attacked $90 million settlement with the US government earlier this year. That case is about tracking users. The platform has been accused of continuing to track its users even after they leave the platform.
In that case, the company allegedly violated the privacy of its users, which websites they visited outside of Facebook. These were websites with buttons like Facebook at the time. Meta then sells the data to advertisers.