Delaware, July 19 (V7N) – Mark Zuckerberg and other current and former Meta executives have agreed to settle a shareholder lawsuit seeking $8 billion in damages over repeated violations of Facebook users’ privacy. The agreement was presented Thursday in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, where the trial was in its second day.
 
The lawsuit, brought by Meta shareholders, accused Zuckerberg, board member Marc Andreessen, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and others of allowing the company to violate a 2012 agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that required Facebook to protect user data. In 2019, the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion over the violations—one of the largest privacy-related fines in U.S. history.
 
Shareholders argued that Meta’s leadership should be personally liable for the financial damage to the company and demanded reimbursement from the defendants’ own assets. All defendants denied wrongdoing, calling the claims “extreme.”
 
Details of the settlement were not disclosed, and Meta—the company itself was not named as a defendant—declined to comment. Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and others will avoid having to testify under oath. The trial was expected to include testimony from former board members Peter Thiel and Reed Hastings, but the judge adjourned proceedings following news of the settlement.
 
The case was seen as a major test of “Caremark” oversight claims, among the most difficult to prove in corporate law. Shareholders alleged Meta leadership failed to ensure compliance with privacy obligations, and that Facebook operated as a “data harvesting” business with little internal control.
 
This marks the second time Zuckerberg has avoided court testimony over company strategy. A similar move in 2017 saw Facebook abandon a controversial stock plan shortly before Zuckerberg was to appear in court.
 
The case stemmed from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from millions of Facebook users was accessed by a political consulting firm involved in the 2016 Trump campaign, ultimately prompting the record-setting FTC penalty.
 
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