New Mexico reportedly seeks up to $40B in penalties from Meta over data privacy

Arundhati Sarkar

• New Mexico on Thursday asked a judge to order Meta Platforms (META) to pay between $35B and $40B in penalties after a jury found the company misled consumers about the privacy of their Facebook data in a case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
• Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent, according to Reuters.
• The jury returned its verdict ​on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties, the report said.
• Attorneys ​for Meta and New Mexico clashed at the hearing over how much was appropriate to order, with Meta arguing that the penalties ⁠the state was seeking don't match the conduct the state focused its case on at trial.
• "Well, when the parties go to trial, they roll the ​dice," said Mathew. "They have to accept the consequences of their decision to go to trial, do they not?"

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