Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg will testify in the Cambridge Analytica privacy lawsuit

Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg will testify in a lawsuit alleging that Facebook illegally shared user data with research firm Cambridge Analytica. Users sued after it was revealed that a UK research firm connected to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign obtained access to the data of up to 87 million subscribers to the social media network.

Since the suit was filed in 2018, lawyers for the consumers have gained leverage to pry into the company's internal records to back up their claims that it failed to safeguard their personal data in hard-fought battles over pretrial information sharing. If Facebook's parent company loses the case, it could be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to a filing Tuesday in San Francisco federal court, Zuckerberg has agreed to a six-hour deposition, while Sandberg will be questioned for up to five hours. Javier Olivan, the company's long-term growth leader, faces up to three hours of deposition questioning. When Sandberg formally leaves the company in the fall, he will take her place as COO.

Following the revelation in 2018 that Trump's campaign benefited from the work of an app developer who began by collecting personal information from 300,000 users, and later, from those users' friends, Facebook faced a storm of controversy. Users were unaware that the developer shared the data trove with Cambridge Analytica, which used it to target voters in 2016 with hyper-specific appeals via "psychographic" modelling.