After all, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, wants to settle the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company proposed to the judge handling the case in the Northern District of California, United States, to suspend the class action lawsuit for about 60 days so that the plaintiffs’ attorneys and Facebook reach a written agreement. The size of the proposed deal is unknown at this time, and a company spokesman declined to comment.

Reuters news agency reported that the petition was filed by Facebook on Friday, August 26. It should be borne in mind that this class action lawsuit alleges Facebook illegally shared user data with the discredited UK-based company. At the time, Facebook acknowledged that Cambridge Analytica would have accessed the data of about 87 million people, a figure that was later corrected to 50 million users.

Apparently Cambridge Analytica’s intention was to create a psychographic profile of voters. The company has been hired by former President Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 primaries.

This settlement with the plaintiffs comes just in time, as Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg are scheduled to testify for about 11 hours between them. If the deal is successful, the two will avoid questions about their role in the context of the scandal.

In 2018, when the scandal broke, Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to the United States Congress to testify. As a result, evasive answers were obtained that required forensic follow-up. Then, in 2019, the $5 billion settlement between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was heavily criticized by commissioners for allowing the social network to buy immunity from its management team.

Despite the fact that Cambridge Analytica extracted data from Facebook in several countries, apart from the US, its founders refused to testify before international parliaments. He had only a brief public session in front of a deputy chair of legislators from the European Union. For this scandal, Facebook received a penalty of £500,000 in the UK, the maximum set by the country’s regulatory body, and although initially opposed the sentence, later reached an agreement without admitting responsibility.