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. The court ruled that Meta was responsible for 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer privacy laws, with each charge carrying a penalty of up to $5,000, leading to the record-breaking sum. Judge Francis J. Mathew of the Santa Fe State District Court made the ruling.
This comes on top of about $950 million in damages assessed earlier in the year after the state's judiciary found the social media giant liable for harms to children. Also in 2026, Meta negotiated a $17.1 billion settlement in August with 47 states, Washington DC, and other US territories. New Mexico led its own charge against the company and did not take part in that case or 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 due 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 almost certainly be asked about the ruling during that event. Facebook was previously fined $5 billion over the issue by the Federal Trade Commission.
In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he had been "working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again." Four years later, it is still unclear what the company has learned from the experience. Around the same time, Apple's Tim Cook criticized the privacy failing and said the time was past for companies to be allowed to entirely self-regulate. In 2023, a class-action settlement of $725 million over the issue led to payouts for people in the US who used Facebook between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022.
Source: AppleInsider · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing