Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were in line to give hours of depositions in response to a lawsuit over Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, but now that won’t happen — the company has reached a settlement agreement with the plaintiffs. As reported earlier by Reuters, a court filing reveals the parties have reached an agreement in principle and requested a stay of 60 days to finalize their written agreement. Without the settlement and stay, they would have been deposed before September 20th.
You can read the document for yourself below, but so far, there are no details about the terms of the agreement. Meta, as the company is now known, declined to comment via a spokesperson, while lawyers for the plaintiffs have not yet responded to an inquiry from The Verge. Still, I’d guess that keeping things from going any further is worth a lot of money to Meta, no matter how much it’s spending on VR.
Now, Zuckerberg will only have to take questions from Joe Rogan and talk about new VR headsets, instead of going under oath in front of opposing counsel about the details of what happened within his company around the time of the 2016 election.
The lawsuit alleged that Facebook illegally shared user data with third parties, and said the company didn’t adequately protect that data from being abused by bad actors. Zuckerberg faced questions from Congress in 2018 that didn’t do much to clear up the scandal or explain exactly what happened with Cambridge Analytica, a firm hired by the Trump presidential campaign that was able to scrape data from millions of Facebook profiles.