Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers at the Facebook parent have settled a case with shareholders over claims they failed to safeguard users’ data, leading to billions of dollars in fines for the company.

The settlement, which was announced on Thursday, means Zuckerberg and prominent former Meta figures will not have to testify under oath about Meta’s approach to privacy.

Campaigners said the settlement was a loss for public accountability.

Settlement

The shareholders filed the lawsuit in 2018, seeking for the defendants to reimburse Meta for $8 billion (£5.9bn) in fines they say the company was forced to pay out because of lax oversight.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed.

In 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Meta $5bn, saying it had failed to uphold the terms of a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.

The fine related to Meta’s failure to prevent now-defunct political consultancy Cambridge Analytica from accessing users’ data en masse to help guide political campaigns.

Zuckerberg had been expected to testify on Monday, with former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg following on Wednesday.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Meta board member, had been scheduled to testify last Thursday, the day that the settlement was announced.

The defendants denied the allegations, calling them “extreme claims”.

High-profile testimony

Others expected to testify included former Meta board members Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, and Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix.

Jason Kint, head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers, said the settlement was “a missed opportunity for public accountability”.

The settlement meant Meta would not have to expose information about its “business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data”, Kint said.