A New Mexico jury found Meta committed more than 43 million violations of state consumer protection law by deceiving users about data privacy — but unless the fine actually exceeds what the company makes from harvesting your information, nothing changes for ordinary Americans.
The verdict is the latest legal fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a third-party personality quiz siphoned data from roughly 87 million Facebook profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm that counted Donald Trump's 2016 campaign among its clients. New Mexico sued in 2021, and after a two-week trial in Santa Fe, jurors sided with prosecutors on nearly every count. The jury reviewed 34 statements Meta made about its data protections and content policies and found the company deceived users in almost every case, affecting the state's entire population of more than two million people.
The state is asking the judge to impose the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation. Multiply that by 43 million and the theoretical ceiling is staggering. But the judge hasn't set a penalties hearing yet, and Meta has already survived billions in prior fines without altering its core business model: harvest data, sell access, pay the ticket, repeat.
Meta's lawyers admitted the company made mistakes in how it handled privacy and misinformation in the past, according to Engadget, but denied that Facebook sold users' data or profited from hate speech. During closing arguments, the company claimed the state's evidence was
