Judge Fines Meta $25bn Over Eleven Years of Privacy Lies
A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25bn, the largest fine in the company’s history, finding it wilfully misled users about who controlled their data between 2010 and 2021. The state’s attorney general called it a warning to Silicon Valley. Meta says the ruling makes it all but impossible to do business there.
The judgment followed a two-week trial in Santa Fe, and the finding is about honesty rather than any single breach: “Facebook promised users that they controlled their data. This was false,” the judge wrote, adding that the deception went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices”. The scale is worth putting in proportion. The sum is roughly a quarter’s profits for a company that reported revenue up 26% to $64.5bn last quarter, with profits tripling to $9.8bn; one account has the full calculated penalty at $219bn before the judge reduced it. The number of violations is given as more than 40 million by one outlet and more than 43 million by two others. Forty-eight other states settled similar claims; New Mexico, with a population of about two million, went to trial alone and will put the money into its education fund. Meta’s chief legal officer said the case amounted to “a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online”. The attorney general’s reply was that a small state’s judgment “should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech”.