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Affected individuals may be able to apply for compensatory payment in the second quarter of 2025.
In a landmark settlement, Meta will pay A$50m to Australian Facebook users affected by the Cambridge Analytica controversy.
The Australian information commissioner Elizabeth Tydd alleged that the personal information of more than 310,000 Facebook users in the country was disclosed to a third-party app between November 2013 and December 2015, which may have then transferred that information to the UK-based Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company, breaching the country’s privacy protection laws.
The agreement announced today (17 December) comes after a months-long court-ordered mediation and is the result of a federal court civil penalty proceeding launched in 2020.
“Today’s settlement represents the largest ever payment dedicated to addressing concerns about the privacy of individuals in Australia,” Tydd said.
“It represents a substantive resolution of privacy concerns raised by the Cambridge Analytica matter, gives potentially affected Australians an opportunity to seek redress through Meta’s payment programme, and brings to an end a lengthy court process.”
Australian Facebook users between 2 November 2013 and 17 December 2015 – who were in the country for more than 30 days during the period – and either installed the ‘This is Your Digital Life’ app, or were Facebook friends with an individual who had this app, are eligible to receive compensation from the A$50m payment pool. Meta will now appoint a third-party administrator to run the payment scheme.
The payment scheme, structured into two tiers, will first allow users to apply for a base payment if they believe they experienced “generalised concern” or “embarrassment” because of the incident.
The second tier will provide for a specific payment, likely higher than the first, that will apply to those who can demonstrate that they have suffered loss or damage due to the incident. Any residual funds will be transferred to the Commonwealth’s Consolidated Revenue Fund.
“The payment scheme is a significant amount that demonstrates that all entities operating in Australia must be transparent and accountable in the way they handle personal information, in accordance with their obligations under Australian privacy law,” Tydd said. “This also applies to global corporations that operate here.”
Meanwhile, the country’s privacy commissioner Carly Kind said: “We remain committed to applying our powers under the Privacy Act to achieve proportionate outcomes to ensure that Australians’ privacy is protected, particularly with respect to technologies that have a high privacy impact. This groundbreaking outcome reflects the significant concerns of the Australian community.”
Cambridge Analytica incident in Australia
In 2010, Meta – then known as Facebook – launched Graph API (application programming interface), which allowed third-party apps that Facebook users logged into using their platform credentials, to access – with their permission – information from the installers of the app and their Facebook friends (if the privacy settings allowed).
Later, in 2013, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, launched an app called ‘This is Your Digital Life’ using the Graph API. In 2015 however, it was revealed that Dr Kogan and his company, Global Science Research Limited may have been transferring user information it gathered through the API to Cambridge Analytica.
After media reports revealing the information surfaced, Meta launched an investigation into the matter and terminated the app’s usage of the API and its access to Facebook.
A few years later, in 2018, Australia’s Information Office launched an investigation into case, extending the remit to Meta over concerns that the social media platform may have interfered with the privacy of Australian individuals.
The office alleged in 2023 that Meta’s systems raised concerns about the protection of Australian user information in relation to the incident and that the company may have repeatedly breached certain sections of the country’s Privacy Act.
In 2022, Meta had agreed to pay $725m to resolve a similar lawsuit relating to the Cambridge Analytica incident in the US after it emerged that that data from up to 87m Facebook users was harvested and used for targeted political campaigning in the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the UK.
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