Image credit: Suzanne Kantra/ Techlicious generated by ChatGPT
Eight years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a jury has finally held Meta accountable for what it told Facebook users about their privacy. On Friday, jurors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found that the company misled the state's residents in statements about how it shared their personal information and how it enforced its own rules, Reuters reports.
Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. In 2018, news reports revealed that data from as many as 87 million Facebook users had been harvested through a third-party app that was then used to build profiles of voters.
New Mexico's attorney general sued Meta in 2021. The state argued that Meta was selling that data to third-party apps like the one Cambridge Analytica relied on, while misleading users. The state pointed to specific statements, including comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company blog posts, that it said made people believe they controlled what happened to the information they shared on Facebook.
Jurors found that 31 of the 34 statements the state challenged were unfair or deceptive under New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, the Albuquerque Journal reports. They also found each statement reached at least an estimated 1.4 million New Mexico Facebook users in 2020, which could add up to tens of millions of individual violations.
Meta's lawyers argued the state cherry-picked snippets and ignored context in which the company acknowledged its handling of privacy and misinformation wasn't perfect. The jury sided with the state, and Judge Francis Mathew will now decide how much Meta must pay.
This is Meta's second loss to New Mexico in six months. In March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta misled users about young people's safety on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and ordered it to pay $375 million. A judge later directed Meta to pay $567 million into a state fund for teen mental health.
Weeks after that ruling, Meta agreed to pay up to about $17.1 billion to settle with 51 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories over claims it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young children. That deal included $459 million for several states with their own Cambridge Analytica cases. New Mexico opted out of that settlement, which is why this case went to trial.
