Meta hit with $25 billion penalty for lying to users about privacy

A New Mexico judge hit Meta with a record-breaking $25 billion penalty on Wednesday, stemming from a lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

The ruling follows September's guilty finding after a two-week trial. Ultimately, the court ruled that Meta was responsible for 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer privacy laws.

Each charge carried a penalty of up to $5000, leading to the record-breaking sum.

And this is on top of about $950 million in damages previously assessed earlier in the year after the state's judiciary found the social media giant liable for harms to children.

Further, the company negotiated a $17.1 billion settlement the company in August with 47 states, Washington DC, and other US territories. New Mexico led its own charge against the company and did not get involved in that case, nor its settlement.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has generated about $168.6 billion in profit over the trailing twelve months.

Meta's earnings are after the market closes on Wednesday, just hours after this announcement. The company has not replied to a request for comment from the New York Times yet, but it will certainly get asked some during that event.

Facebook has previously been fined $5 billion over the issue by the Federal Trade Commission.

Speaking in 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he had been "working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again." Four years later, it's still not yet clear what the company has gleaned from the experience.

At around the same time, Apple's Tim Cook criticized the privacy failing, and said that it meant the time was past for companies to be allowed to entirely self-regulate.

"I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said at the time, in answer to a question posed about Facebook. "However, I think we're beyond that here."

In 2023, there was a class-action payout from a $725 million settlement about the issue. The claim period is long past, and people in the US who used Facebook between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, were eligible to receive a payment.