New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25 billion in privacy case
New Mexico court imposes $25 billion penalty on Meta
A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties after finding more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. The ruling, issued on Wednesday by state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew, stems from a data privacy lawsuit filed in 2021 following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Judge Mathew criticised Meta and Facebook for statements about consumer privacy in the state. In the ruling, he wrote that Facebook promised users they controlled their data, but concluded that this representation was false.
The penalty concerns privacy practices connected to the collection and use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm whose activities became public in 2018. Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticised the decision and said the company intends to appeal.
Cambridge Analytica case centred on data gathered through an app
Cambridge Analytica obtained information belonging to millions of Facebook users without their consent to create psychographic profiles. The information was gathered through a personality quiz application called thisisyourdigitallife.
About 300,000 people took the psychological test. The app also collected information associated with their Facebook friends, ultimately assembling a dataset of 87 million profiles. Meta banned the app in 2015 for violating its platform policy and sent Cambridge Analytica a legal demand to delete the data it had collected.
Cambridge Analytica announced in May 2018 that it was immediately ceasing operations. The company had also been involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.
Latest ruling adds to prior Meta privacy settlements and penalties
The New Mexico decision follows several major actions related to the same wider privacy controversy. In December 2022, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that it improperly shared users’ information with Cambridge Analytica.
Meta also received a $5 billion fine from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over conduct that undermined users’ ability to control privacy on Facebook. In August, the company reached a settlement with nearly all U.S. states and territories, excluding New Mexico and Florida, to pay $18 billion over the next decade and introduce stronger child-safety measures for Facebook and Instagram. That agreement includes $459 million for claims connected to Cambridge Analytica.
For organisations that collect customer information or permit third-party applications to access it, the ruling underlines the business importance of ensuring that public privacy promises, access controls and data-deletion processes match actual practices.