A New Mexico judge on Wednesday, October 21, ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the Facebook owner had misled consumers about the privacy of their data — one of the largest financial penalties in US history, Reuters reported.
Source: Reuters via KVOX Froggy 99.9
State District Judge Francis Mathew, sitting in Santa Fe, found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law, but reduced the figure to $25 billion in his order, which came more than three weeks after the verdict. A jury on September 25 found 43,899,725 willful violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act across 26 public statements by Meta and its leadership spanning May 2010 to August 2021, according to Techi's summary of the order.
Source: Techi
How the number grew so large
The case stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a third-party quiz app harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook accounts for political targeting. New Mexico sued Meta in 2021, accusing it of lying to Facebook users in the state about who had access to their data. State law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation, which is how the jury's count of more than 43 million violations produced a ceiling of about $219.5 billion. The state had sought up to $40 billion, while Meta's lawyers asked the court to cap the penalty at $3.45 billion, arguing the state never proved real harm to consumers, according to Reuters and CNBC reporting cited by gagadget.
Source: gagadget (CNBC)
"Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Mathew wrote in his order, Reuters reported. In the order, as quoted in coverage of the ruling, he also wrote: "Facebook promised users that they controlled their data. This was false."
Source: Reuters via KVOX Froggy 99.9
Meta says it will appeal
Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the company is confident it will win on appeal. "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," Mahoney said in a statement reported by Reuters. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."
Source: Reuters via KVOX Froggy 99.9
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez welcomed the ruling and said the penalty was one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in US history, Reuters reported. By law the money goes to New Mexico's schools, not to individual users, and the judgment accrues interest at 15% a year — about $3.75 billion a year — until it is paid, according to Techi. For scale: the US Federal Trade Commission's penalty over the same scandal in 2019 was $5 billion, and 48 other states settled with Meta rather than going to trial, CNBC reported.
Source: National Technology News (Reuters)
Penalty ordered: $25 billion (yaani 2,500 crore dollars). Penalty the judge found warranted: $219.5 billion. Violations found by the jury: 43,899,725, at up to $5,000 each. Meta asked for a $3.45 billion cap. Payment is not immediate — Meta says it will appeal.