A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company spent years deceiving users about its data privacy practices, CBS News reported.
In September, jurors found Facebook made false or misleading statements by telling users they controlled how their information was shared and that it didn’t sell or share personal data with advertisers. Judge Francis Mathew wrote that the misstatements, including by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, were “part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.”
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a personality quiz harvested data from about 87 million profiles for political ad targeting.
“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said.
Sources: CBS News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
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