A New Mexico court ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay a $25 billion penalty over data privacy violations connected to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The whopping penalty comes more than eight years after the stories of the data-harvesting scandal first broke and sparked political uproar in the United States. Politicians and social media users have raised concerns since the 2018 reports first broke about the United Kingdom-based firm improperly scraping up Facebook profiles without user consent, leading to multiple lawsuits and legal battles.
Judge Francis Mathew, civil judge for New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court, decided the penalty amount on Wednesday, less than one month after a civil jury found Meta liable for misleading its users about its data privacy terms. The jury found Meta liable for millions of violations of the state’s consumer protection laws.
“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, and the clearly intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty,” Mathew wrote in a court filing.
New Mexico is the only state to impose a penalty on Meta after the data scandal related to the 2016 elections, as every other state chose to settle with the social media giant.
The state had sought $35 to $40 billion in penalties, while Meta sought to pay no more than $3.4 billion, according to the Associated Press.
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“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, told the Washington Examiner. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
Cambridge Analytica collected the personal data of 50 million Facebook users for political targeting and its work with President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $5.1 billion in civil penalties to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission over the data breach.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
