The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Facebook parent company Meta, stemming from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.
After hearing arguments in November, the justices on Friday dismissed Meta’s appeal, effectively acknowledging that they should not have taken up the case initially. This decision leaves a lower court ruling in place allowing the lawsuit to proceed.
The investors behind the lawsuit allege that Meta failed to adequately disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information could be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm involved in Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign.
The investors argue that these inadequate disclosures contributed to two significant drops in Meta’s stock price in 2018, as the public became aware of the full scope of the privacy scandal, the Associated Press reported.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the court’s action disappointed the company. “The plaintiff’s claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court,” Stone said in an emailed statement.
The company has already paid a $5.1 billion fine and settled a $725 million privacy claim with Facebook users.
Cambridge Analytica, which had connections to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon, paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal data of approximately 87 million Facebook users. This information was then utilized to target U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Meta lawsuit is one of two class-action cases involving tech companies currently before the Supreme Court. The justices are also deliberating whether to allow a class-action suit against Nvidia to proceed. Investors in that case allege the company misled them about its reliance on selling computer chips for the mining of volatile cryptocurrencies, the AP added.
According to reports from 2018 to 2019, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign offered the same tools and access to Facebook user data as the Trump campaign. Many reports said the Clinton campaign turned down the offer.
But in March 2018, Fox News reported that “Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign may have harvested the Facebook data of millions of people using an app that asked them to pair their Facebook friends list with their smartphone’s contacts list – in a bid to reach those people and persuade them to vote for Clinton.”
The Clinton campaign introduced a mobile application called “Hillary 2016,” which circumvented restrictions on gathering information from users’ friends without their consent, Fox noted.
The campaign’s use of big data has drawn scrutiny, especially in light of the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica—a data-focused firm linked to the Trump campaign accused of harvesting Facebook data to target potential voters.
There's never been a campaign app like this before. Download it today to help Hillary win. https://t.co/K1Aw88vS9Hhttps://t.co/iJNSagEoVc
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 24, 2016
Clinton campaign officials denied any wrongdoing at the time, Fox noted.
Facebook banned the practice of accessing users’ friends lists in 2014, after former President Barack Obama’s campaign utilized the method to obtain data on millions of potential voters.
However, the Clinton campaign’s “Hillary 2016” app exploited a special iPhone and Facebook integration, prompting users to sync their Facebook friends list with their phone contacts and grant the campaign access to that information, Fox continued.
Individuals who didn’t download the app had no way to prevent their friends from linking their phone numbers to their Facebook accounts if those friends opted to do so.
After syncing their friends list with the app, users were prompted to swipe through their Facebook friends and exclude those they believed would never vote for Clinton. The remaining friends were then sorted by location, allowing users to send pre-written text messages encouraging them to support Clinton through various suggested methods, Fox noted further.
