A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading privacy claims tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Judge Francis J.
Mathew cited over 43 million violations of state law regarding user data control.
Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook was telling users they were in control of their data, but that wasn't true. Meta's chief legal counsel, CJ Mahoney, criticized the decision and said the company plans to appeal.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 and is related to the case of Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm. The company obtained personal data of millions of Facebook users without consent, which it used to create personality profiles.
The data was collected through the personality test app “thisisyourdigitallife.” Around 300.000 users reportedly took the test, but the app also collected data on their friends. In total, data was gathered from 87 million profiles.
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Judge orders Meta to pay $25 billion fine
Facebook banned the app in 2015 for violating the platform's rules and legally required Cambridge Analytica to delete the data. The case became public in 2018. In May of that year, Cambridge Analytica announced it was shutting down immediately. The company had also worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
In December 2022, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the improper sharing of user information with Cambridge Analytica. In 2019, Meta faced a $5 billion fine from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for limiting users' ability to control their privacy on Facebook.
In August 2026, Meta agreed with nearly every U.S. state and territory except New Mexico and Florida to pay $18 billion over the next decade. The agreement also includes stronger child safety measures on Facebook and Instagram and $459 million for claims related to Cambridge Analytica.
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