Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which came to light in 2018.
According to multiple reports from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called out Meta and Facebook for making misleading statements about the privacy of consumers in the state.
“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data,” Mathew wrote in his ruling. “This was false.”
The penalty relates to more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. The case, filed in 2021, was filed in the aftermath of revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, obtained data belonging to millions of Facebook users without their consent to build psychographic profiles.
The data was collected via a personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” Around 300,000 users are said to have taken the psychological test, although it later emerged that the app also collected the data associated with their friends, thereby amassing a dataset of 87 million profiles.
Meta banned the app in 2015 for violating its platform policy. The company also sent a legal request to Cambridge Analytica to delete the collected data. Following the data scandal, Cambridge Analytica announced in May 2018 that it was immediately ceasing operations. Notably, the company was involved in Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
In December 2022, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of improperly sharing users’ information with Cambridge Analytica. Previously, it faced a $5 billion fine from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for undermining users’ ability to control their privacy on Facebook.
Back in August, the company also reached a settlement with nearly all U.S. states and territories, except New Mexico and Florida, to pay $18 billion over the next decade and implement stronger child-safety measures on Facebook and Instagram. This also includes $459 million for claims related to the Cambridge Analytica matter.
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the latest penalty, adding the company intends to appeal the decision.
