Meta fined $25bn in New Mexico data privacy case, BBC reports

A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25bn on 21 October over years of misleading statements about how Facebook handled users’ personal data, BBC News reported. The penalty follows a two-week trial earlier this year and is described by the broadcaster as the largest imposed on the company.

Meta intends to appeal. Its chief lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the decision made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and expressed confidence that the company would succeed in challenging it.

Judge Francis Mathew characterised the violations as deliberate and said they extended over more than 11 years, from 2010 to 2021. His order said communications involving senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were intended to mislead the public.

Case centred on assurances about third-party access

New Mexico’s lawsuit grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The political consultancy used information from millions of Facebook users in its work, including activities connected to the 2016 US presidential election.

State lawyers challenged repeated assurances by Meta executives that third parties could not receive or access user data without permission. They argued that those assurances did not reflect the company’s actual practices.

The lawyers alleged that roughly two million people—the state’s entire population—were affected by the misleading statements. A jury found more than 40 million violations of state law. The population-wide impact was the state’s argument, rather than a separately established count of people whose data was accessed.

Judge reduced the calculated penalty

State lawyers sought a penalty of up to $40bn, while Meta argued that any amount above $3.4bn would be unconstitutional. The judge’s order calculated a full penalty of $219bn before reducing it to $25bn.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez welcomed the decision, saying: “Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”

The company previously faced a $5bn penalty from the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over its data privacy practices.

Separate child-safety cases

The privacy ruling is distinct from New Mexico’s child-safety litigation against Meta. The state also secured a penalty of almost $1bn this year over misleading statements about the safety of the company’s social media services for children.

Meta also reached an $18bn settlement involving California and other states over child-safety issues. That agreement ended the case shortly after its trial began and included neither a fine nor an admission of wrongdoing—a material distinction from the New Mexico privacy judgment.