The $550 million settlement – revealed by company executives during their latest earnings call – comes after Facebook tried, and failed, to quash the lawsuit in a petition to the Supreme Court that might have made it harder for other Web users to bring similar legal actions. It must still be reviewed by a judge.

Under Illinois law, tech giants and other companies must obtain explicit permission before collecting a wide array of biometric data, including scans of one’s face. Plaintiffs alleged that Facebook ran afoul of those rules as part of a feature meant to spot, identify and recommend tags of users in photos that had been uploaded to the social-networking site.

The case quickly evolved into a major test of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, known as BIPA, and its provisions allowing users to sue, known as a private right of action, an idea that consumer-advocates and regulators around the country increasingly tout as a critical way for people to seek justice for major digital abuses. Tech giants vehemently oppose such private lawsuits, and in Illinois, Facebook sought to rebuff the case on grounds that users could not prove they had been directly, sufficiently harmed.

Facebook tried to take the matter to the Supreme Court, but the nation’s top justices rejected the case last week. Their decision essentially would have allowed the lawsuit to proceed on the merits before the tech giant announced it had been settled in principle as part of its fourth quarter 2019 earnings, during which it reported roughly $21 billion in revenue.

Jay Edelson, a lawyer whose firm represented plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, said late Wednesday that “biometric privacy is one of the biggest fights of the day,” adding: “We are proud of this settlement and hope that others will follow Facebook’s lead.”

Facebook did not provide further details. “We decided to pursue settlement as it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter,” spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.

Four years after Russian agents weaponized those services in a bid to undermine the 2016 election, Warren expressed fresh alarm that Silicon Valley’s efforts only “nibble around the edges,” failing to fully combat online threats that mislead voters or stoke conflict, including among Democrats competing for the White House in 2020.

“Anyone who seeks to challenge and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election must be fully prepared to take on the full array of disinformation that foreign actors and people in and around the Trump campaign will use to divide Democrats, suppress Democratic votes, and erode the standing of the Democratic nominee,” said Warren, the senator from Massachusetts. “And anyone who seeks to be the Democratic nominee must condemn the use of disinformation and pledge not to knowingly use it to benefit their own candidacy or damage others.”

One of her Democratic rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, issued a similar pledge last summer, saying he would not “fabricate, use or spread data or materials that were falsified, fabricated, doxed or stolen” and would not use doctored visuals, including so-called “deep fakes,” or “bot networks to disseminate messages.”

But the party as a whole has not set guidelines. State Democratic chairs last year backed a resolution on election integrity urging the Democratic National Committee to establish a “framework which would discourage and prevent … illicit campaign tactics.” But the proposal never came up for a vote before national party leaders.

Still, the DNC has stepped up its efforts to protect campaigns and state parties from deceptive online attacks, including issuing recommendations in December on combating disinformation. The advice for campaigns included tasking a digital staffer with monitoring social media traffic and being more active in pushing back against false narratives online. The party has its own team that uses online monitoring tools to track the spread of falsehoods, providing information to individual campaigns.

Along with her personal commitment, Warren said Wednesday her presidency would push for civil and criminal penalties for those who seek to mislead people online about when, where and how to vote. She also promised to seek sanctions against countries, including Russia, that attempt to undermine U.S. elections with online propaganda.

In the meantime, Warren called on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech giants to take immediate steps to bolster their disinformation defenses, including notifying users who have interacted with fake accounts or the manipulated content they share.

Warren’s call to action – issued days before Iowans are set to cast the first votes of the presidential election – reflects a growing trepidation among Democrats about the digital landscape in 2020.

In October, Facebook acknowledged fresh efforts by agents tied to the Russian government to seed posts, photos and videos designed to exacerbate tensions between Democratic candidates and their supporters. Along with new foreign threats, Democrats also have struggled to contend with repeated broadsides from President Trump’s campaign, which has purchased numerous ads on Facebook that contain lies about his Democratic foes.

Seedy accounts on Twitter spread duplicitously edited video of former Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year. Warren’s opponents similarly tried to rile black voters against her candidacy using a highly doctored photo. And backers for Sen. Bernie Sanders and his 2020 bid have been some of the most aggressive online, weaponizing features on Facebook to share viral, hostile memes about his fellow Democratic contenders.

Top Democrats publicly have blasted Facebook, Google and Twitter for failing to take aggressive action against disinformation. Each company in recent years has hired more content reviewers, and with the aid of artificial intelligence, acted more aggressively to thwart what Facebook calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The team will run a rapid response operation out of the Iowa Democratic Party’s main operations center in Des Moines on caucus night, the DNC’s chief technology officer Nellwyn Thomas said in an interview.

The team will be standing by to act on any reports of possible hacking of caucus technology. It will also flag for social media companies anything that violates their policies and work with the state party and campaigns to punch back at phony narratives that spread online.

“All eyes are on Iowa,” Thomas told me. “Any doubt about the outcome or especially about the legitimacy of the process could really cast a shadow, so we’re doing everything we can to be ready for it.”

Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus will mark the DNC’s greatest challenge so far in efforts to guard its presidential contenders from the same fate that befell Hillary Clinton in 2016 when her campaign was upended by a Russian-backed hacking and disinformation effort.

The DNC has surged its work on cybersecurity since then and even intervened to quash Iowa state Democratic Party plans to allow some people to caucus remotely using smartphone apps over security concerns. The national party has also held biweekly calls with campaigns to talk about cybersecurity and disinformation and run anti-disinformation war rooms during the Democratic debates, Thomas told me.

But Monday’s caucuses will be the first time those efforts come face to face with the actual voting process, and threats to the 2020 contest are already emerging. Social media companies are already seeing evidence of Russian attempts to sow disinformation about Democratic candidates, notably an October campaign uncovered by Instagram that spread false narratives about former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who has since dropped out of the race.

Microsoft also reported in October that Iranian hackers tried to penetrate email address associated with a presidential campaign — which Reuters identified as the Trump campaign. And intelligence officials have warned that Russia, China, Iran, and other nations “will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions” in 2020.

“This is the highest stakes because what’s on the line is the will of the Democratic electorate, and there’s nothing more important than that,” Thomas said. “The most important thing is making sure that we have truth and accuracy coming out of such an important milestone in our nomination process.”

Thomas declined to say how many DNC security and disinformation staffers will be on the ground in Iowa, but said it will be a decent portion of the 55-member team dedicated to those issues. The team will be especially focused on disinformation operations, she said. That’s partly because caucuses are less dependent on technology than primaries and thus less in danger of hacking. It’s also because they involve a highly complicated process of allotting delegates that’s not well understood by the public and “makes them ripe for misinterpretation and misinformation,” Thomas said.

They will be in close contact with the party’s voter protection teams who will be monitoring caucus sites and can report back about whether online reports about difficulties registering or accessing caucusing sites or other problems are legitimate or made up.

The team will be be on the lookout for coordinated disinformation campaigns from abroad — and for less coordinated efforts that seek to undermine public confidence in the results, including by suggesting caucus results were tallied wrong or that a candidates’ supporters were disenfranchised. Those could come from disgruntled Republicans or even from Democrats who aren’t happy about how the night is going for their preferred candidate, she said.

“There’s a full spectrum of potential false narratives and we’re going to be monitoring all of them. What we’re really focused on is any false narrative about the legitimacy of the results,” Thomas told me. “That could be really detrimental to voters’ trust in this process.”

The DNC plans to run similar efforts to protect other primaries and caucuses but is waiting to see what happens in Iowa before finalizing those plans, Thomas told me.

Its Iowa efforts are also part of a broader government plan to protect the caucus. The Department of Homeland Security’s main cybersecurity division will run an online chat room throughout the night for election and campaign officials to sort through reports of suspicious activity.

The state party has also spent months working with the DNC and cybersecurity experts to test and safeguard digital systems that will transmit caucus results, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Tom Price told me in a statement.

“Iowa has the honor of holding the first-in-the-nation state party contest and we take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our democratic process and secure Iowans’ votes very seriously,” Price said. “We continue to work closely with security experts to prepare our systems, and we are confident in the security systems we have in place.”

The results are a remarkable comeback from a year ago, when the most valuable technology company missed its own targets. A sales forecast for the current quarter also exceeded analysts’ projections, while services revenue came in slightly below expectations.

The shares, which have more than doubled over the past year, gained as much as 3% to $327.25 at 9:37 a.m. in New York. That’s the highest intraday valuation since the stock started trading in the 1980s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“The strength is coming from the iPhone and continued really strong growth in wearables and the App Store,” said Shannon Cross of Cross Research. “The iPhone was very strong.”

The Cupertino, California-based company reported $91.8 billion in revenue for the fiscal first quarter, up 9% from a year earlier. Wall Street was looking for $88.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit was $4.99 a share, also beating analysts’ expectations.

For the fiscal second quarter, Apple said sales will be between $63 billion and $67 billion. Analysts estimated $62.3 billion, on average.

After years of rapid growth, Apple’s expansion has slowed as demand for smartphones waned and competition from Chinese rivals intensified. Under Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, the company’s strategy has evolved. It now aims to sell new handsets to customers every three to five years, and then offer as many services and accessories as possible in the intervening years.

On Tuesday, Cook said Apple saw “strong demand” for the latest iPhones and noted that a base of more than 1.5 billion devices has been “a great driver of our growth across the board.”

Cook addressed the coronavirus during a conference call with analysts, saying Apple is following developments in China. The company is working closely with employees and partners in the region, he added. Virtually all iPhones are made by Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. in Zhengzhou, China, and by Pegatron Corp. at an assembly site near Shanghai.

Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said the revenue range projected for the fiscal second quarter was wider than usual due to uncertainty created by the spread of the virus.

Analysts have been particularly excited about wearable accessories, such as the Apple Watch and AirPods.

However, the iPhone still generates the majority of Apple’s revenue. And this crucial business has improved from a dire performance in last year’s holiday period. The iPhone 11 and 11 Pro models were well received in their debut in the fall and demand in China has been particularly strong, outselling 2018’s releases in a market that has otherwise been shrinking.

Apple generated $56 billion in revenue from the iPhone in the fiscal first quarter, up 8% from a year earlier. That was a lot better than the 2018 holiday period, when sales of the handset dropped about 15%. Apple cut the price of its entry-level flagship iPhone by $50, luring buyers. There are also millions of older iPhones that are losing software support from the company, spurring new purchases.

Wearables, including AirPods, and other accessories generated $10 billion in revenue in the holiday quarter, up 37% from a year ago.

The company reported Services revenue of $12.7 billion, up 17% from the same period last year. That missed analysts’ forecasts. This business still mostly relies on older offerings such as the App Store, iCloud storage and Apple Music. It’s unclear how well Apple TV+, the Apple Card and the Apple Arcade gaming subscription are performing, but there have been signs of weak demand for Apple News+, the company’s digital magazine subscription.

“One note of caution in an otherwise strong report was that Services, which included Apple TV+, grew slightly below expectations,” said EMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser. “This miss could be attributed to the competition from Disney+, which launched at roughly the same time.”