The Central District Court approved last Thursday a settlement in a class action filed in Israel about eight years ago against tech giant Meta, following the Cambridge Analytica affair. Under the agreement, the company will pay about 8.1 million shekels (roughly $2.2 million) to be used for public purposes and academic research.
Cambridge Analytica, which has since gone bankrupt, worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and gained access to the personal data of millions of Facebook users, helping target them with campaign messages. According to reports, the data was transferred without users’ consent by a researcher who had received permission from Facebook to deploy an app on the platform that collected information from millions of users.
Sharing data of Israeli users
The motion to certify the class action was originally filed in 2018, following the overseas scandal, alleging that Meta allowed third-party apps to collect users’ personal data without their explicit consent. The applicants claimed the data was transferred to Cambridge Analytica for use in a political campaign in the United States. According to the filing in Israel, Meta allegedly shared personal data of Facebook users living in Israel with third-party apps without their knowledge or informed consent. The claim was initially estimated at 80 million shekels (about $22 million) and later amended to about 400 million shekels (roughly $110 million).
Meta denied the allegations, arguing that class members received full disclosure and consented to the data-sharing practices at issue. The company also said no damage was caused to class members and that, in any case, the proportion of Israeli users exposed to and harmed by the practices was significantly lower than claimed. Meta further said it fundamentally changed its policies in 2018, eliminated friend data-sharing features and introduced new safeguards. The parties ultimately entered mediation before Dr. Amos Gabrieli and reached a settlement.
Judge Rami Haimovitch ruled that the settlement was reasonable and fair, particularly given that only 28 users in Israel directly downloaded the app in question. During the proceedings, it was argued that the Cambridge Analytica affair was fundamentally American in nature, as the data collection was intended to target U.S. audiences in the election and had minimal impact in Israel.
For example, only 28 people downloaded the app through which Cambridge Analytica obtained data. Facebook sent precautionary notices to about 47,000 friends of those 28 users, but that does not mean their data was transferred or that they were targeted.
Because identifying all affected users is impractical, the settlement funds will be transferred to a public fund for class actions. About 5 million shekels (roughly $1.4 million) will be allocated to fund research in law and technology in Israeli academia, with the remainder directed toward public initiatives such as privacy protection and democracy education.
Meta noted in the settlement request that the practices at the center of the lawsuit were halted in 2018, before the claims were filed in Israel. For example, it canceled the “friends permissions” feature for all third-party apps.
Before it was discontinued, the “friends permissions” feature allowed third-party Facebook apps to access data about a user’s friends, subject to privacy settings. In practice, once a user installed an app and granted permission, it could access certain information about their friends without those friends’ direct consent.
The applicants were represented by attorneys Yochi Geva, Assaf Pink and Amir Israeli.