Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion in New Mexico Privacy Case
A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company had misled Facebook users about the privacy of their data, in one of the largest corporate penalties in US history. Judge Francis Mathew ruled that Facebook committed nearly 44 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws, initially calculating a penalty of $219.5 billion before reducing it to $25 billion plus 15 percent annual interest.
The case, brought by New Mexico's attorney general in 2021, grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users was harvested without consent. Jurors found that 26 of 29 company statements about privacy, data access and content moderation were misleading. Meta's chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is confident it will win on appeal, and the penalty dwarfs the $5 billion the company paid the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019.
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