An $8bn trial, pitting Meta Platforms shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg and other current and former company leaders, over claims they illegally harvested the data of Facebook users in violation of a 2012 agreement with the United States Federal Trade Commission, is under way.
The trial kicked off on Wednesday with a privacy expert for the plaintiffs, Neil Richards of Washington University Law School, who testified about Facebook’s data policies.
“Facebook’s privacy disclosures were misleading,” he told the court.
Jeffrey Zients, White House chief of staff under former President Joe Biden and a Meta director for two years starting in May 2018, is expected to take the stand later on Wednesday in the non-jury trial before Kathaleen McCormick, chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court.
The case will feature testimony from Zuckerberg and other billionaire defendants, including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, venture capitalist and board member Marc Andreessen, as well as former board members Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies cofounder, and Reed Hastings, cofounder of Netflix.
A lawyer for the defendants, who have denied the allegations, declined to comment.
McCormick, the judge who rescinded Elon Musk’s $56bn Tesla pay package last year, is expected to rule on liability and damages months after the trial concludes.
The case began in 2018, following revelations that data from millions of Facebook users was accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s successful US presidential campaign in 2016.
The FTC fined Facebook $5bn in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying the company had violated a 2012 agreement with the FTC to protect user data.
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