Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit has claimed.
The lawsuit alleges that the size of the $5bn settlement was driven by a desire to protect Facebook’s founder and chief executive from being named in the FTC complaint.
Facebook was fined by the FTC in 2019 for “deceiving” users about its ability to keep personal information private, after a year-long investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach, where a UK analysis firm harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters.
