A New Mexico judge levied what may be the largest penalty ever against a tech giant on Wednesday. The order came after a Santa Fe jury found that Meta had committed 43,899,725 violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. Each carried a penalty of up to $5,000, The New York Times explained.
The suit was originally filed in 2021, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that digital consultants to the Trump campaign “used data improperly obtained from Facebook [owned by Meta] to build voter profiles,” as The Times explained in its detailed report on the scandal.
In his scathing judgement, Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote, “Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model.”
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