A Facebook user based out of Maryland has filed a lawsuit against the social media giant and Cambridge Analytica for gathering user data without permission.
The class-action lawsuit, which was filed by plaintiff Lauren Price at the US District Court in San Jose, seeks an undisclosed amount in damages.
It is the first lawsuit filed by a Facebook user since the scandal over Cambridge Analytica broke.
Facebook has come under fire since it was revealed Friday that the company collected information from more than 50 million Facebook users which may have been used to influence the 2016 presidential election.
"Facebook had known about this security breach for two years, but did little or nothing to protect its users," Price claims in his lawsuit, adding that she was suing to protect her privacy interests and those of other users.
"Incredibly, Facebook's 'trust model' was rife with security vulnerabilities and a near total abnegation of its responsibility to audit its own rules limiting use of Facebook data by third parties," the lawsuit claims.
The suit cites a former Facebook platform operations manager, Sandy Parakilas, as saying, "Facebook felt that it was better not to know."
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Facebook has not commented on the lawsuit yet, but on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence, admitting the company had made a mistake.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, shared Zuckerberg's post and added:
"This was a major violation of peoples' trust, and I deeply regret we didn't do enough to deal with it," she said.
Alexandr Kogan, the researcher from Cambridge University who carried out the survey, told the BBC that both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have tried to place the blame on him.
"My view is that I'm being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," he said. "Honestly, we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately, we thought we were doing something that was really normal."
