August 2022 was an expensive month for tech companies. While the industry as a whole continues to reel from a major tech downturn, Meta, Snap, and TikTok all agreed to pay out settlements to put to rest lingering privacy lawsuits. Combined, those payouts total well over $100 million dollars.
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, just this past week agreed to settle a privacy suit over its disastrous handling of its 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal nearly four years in the making. All of sudden, in an industry where privacy violations often seem the norm, users are beginning to see a flurry of wins.
We took a step back in time to look over some of the most significant, and expensive, privacy-related settlements in recent years. Surprise surprise, some names appear more than once.