Judge gives $725M Facebook settlement final approval

(NEXSTAR) – A judge in San Francisco gave final approval to the massive Facebook privacy settlement on Tuesday.

The social media company has agreed to pay $725 million to settle claims it violated users’ privacy by sharing their data with third parties. While Meta agreed to the payout, it denies wrongdoing.

After months of court proceedings, Judge Vince Chhabria overruled several objections to the settlement Tuesday and granted the settlement his final approval. There’s one more key step before payments can go out: a window for appeals to be filed.

A representative for Angeion, the settlement administrator tasked with processing and paying out claims in this case, told Nexstar it’s still uncertain whether any appeals will be filed in the next 30 days.

If there are no appeals filed, the company is prepared to send out payments “soon” after the window closes, the representative said. An exact date or timeline has yet to be determined.

Whenever you do get your payment, don’t expect it to be a life-changing sum. The exact amount will depend on how long you’ve had an active Facebook account, but lawyers told Judge Chhabria they expect the median payment to be around $30.

Angeion is still working through the approximately 28 million claims it received in the huge lawsuit, validating which claims are valid and throwing out duplicative or fraudulent ones.

“As far as we can tell that’s the largest number of claims ever filed in a class action in the United States,” Lesley Weaver, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case, said in court last month.