On Wednesday, October 21, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay the state a $25 billion civil penalty. The order followed a jury verdict from September that found Meta misled users about how their information was handled. Meta says it will appeal.
I’m not a lawyer, and this one needs care, because a court order that is likely to be appealed is not the last word.
What the jury found
According to ABC News, jurors found in September that Meta violated New Mexico’s consumer-protection law more than 43 million times. The state’s case said Meta deceived users about how much control they had over their information, and about its privacy and content-moderation policies. Fox Business reports that of 29 statements the jury looked at, 26 were found to be misleading.
The case was tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a third-party quiz app collected data from as many as 87 million Facebook users.
What the judge did
Judge Francis Mathew ordered the $25 billion penalty. Fox Business reports that the violations could have supported a penalty of more than $219 billion under state law, and that the judge reduced the amount. He wrote that Facebook’s conduct “goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”
What Meta says
Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the ruling makes it very hard to do business in New Mexico and described the lawsuit as an attempt to tax speech (ABC News). Meta plans to appeal.
What this doesn’t tell us
It doesn’t tell us that your data, or anyone’s in particular, was misused. It isn’t a final result: an outside attorney quoted by Fox Business said he expects a serious appeal fight and doesn’t think Meta will ultimately pay close to $25 billion. And it’s one state’s case, not a ruling on every claim made about Meta.
What it means for you
The core of the jury’s finding was the gap between what people were told about their data and what happened to it. That’s worth taking to heart whichever company it is. A few minutes looking at the apps and websites connected to your Facebook account, and removing the ones you no longer use, is a sensible thing to do this week.
I also want to be plain about the limits. ScrubTrace works on the copies of your information that end up on data broker sites. It can’t reach into Facebook and undo what has already been collected, and it has nothing to do with this case. What I can help with is the broker side: if you want to see what is out there about you, the free scan is a person looking, then an email with what I find. It isn’t automatic or continuous monitoring.
This is general information, not legal advice.
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