Meta has reportedly reached a $37.5 million (roughly Rs. 300 crore) settlement in a lawsuit alleging that the company violated its users’ privacy by collecting their locations without their permission. The firm was accused of collecting its users’ location data without their consent, inferring details from their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to serve them targeted advertising, even after they turned off location services on their smartphones.
Facebook’s parent company Meta filed a motion to settle the lawsuit in San Francisco federal court on Monday. Report via Reuters. As mentioned earlier, the lawsuit claims that Meta collected the private details of its users, including their location, even when their location services were turned off.
US users who used the company’s Facebook social networking service after January 30, 2015 will be included in the settlement, the report said.
The lawsuit alleged that users were served targeted ads based on their location from their IP addresses, which exposed their location to Facebook.
According to reports, the lawsuit against Facebook began in November 2018 after the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the US Congress that the company used location information to help advertisers target users in specific areas. However, the company had denied wrongdoing in the lawsuit, the report said.
