Lawyers for the plaintiffs are demanding that Facebook kick in more than $319,000 in interest after the tech giant failed to place the settlement funds in an interest-bearing escrow account by the settlement’s Oct. 31 deadline.
Facebook made a payment of $721 million—the full amount less payments to the settlement administrator—Friday, but that payment didn’t address interest that would have accrued if the payment had been made on time, the plaintiffs said in a status report filed Friday with the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The parties are in discussions over the interest payments, the report said.
Consumers sued Meta in 2018 after it became public that the British research firm had gained access to the data of at least 87 million Facebook users without their permission in connection with its work for Trump’s campaign.
Facebook also paid a $5 billion fine to the US government in July 2019 to resolve an investigation into its privacy practices that was triggered in part by the controversy over Cambridge Analytica’s alleged data harvesting.
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Facebook’s law firm, was previously hit with $925,000 in sanctions over its conduct in the case.
Judge Vince Chhabria said in a February order that the firm and Facebook had engaged in a “concerted, bad-faith effort” to push the plaintiffs to settle cheaply.
Keller Rohrback LLP and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP represent the plaintiffs. Gibson Dunn; Maynard Nexsen PC; Ross Aronstam & Moritz LLP; and Lewis & Llewellyn LLP represent Facebook.
The case is In re Facebook Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litig., N.D. Cal., No. 3:18-md-02843, 11/2/23.
