Australia's privacy watchdog to enter talks with Facebook owner over Cambridge Analytica lawsuit

Australia’s privacy watchdog will soon enter negotiations with the Facebook owner to end protracted, costly legal proceedings over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, more than five years after it was first revealed.The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is still pursuing Meta, which owns Facebook, in the federal court over alleged privacy breaches affecting more than 300,000 Australian Facebook users caught up in the scandal.The breaches were first exposed in the Guardian in early 2018 and regulators in the US and the UK issued fines to Facebook the following year.The OAIC’s case, launched in 2020, has enjoyed some success in recent months. In March, it convinced the high court not to hear an appeal, a win that allowed it to continue prosecuting the alleged privacy breaches in the federal court.The federal court has now ordered the privacy commissioner and Meta to enter mediation and must find a suitable mediator in September before entering one month’s worth of talks in October.It means the case will not return before Justice Nye Perram until early November.The court has also ordered that the case be split to initially determine whether Meta was liable for the privacy breaches. If that is established, the court can consider
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