Meta ordered to pay $25 billion over data leak

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been ordered to pay $25 billion in a New Mexico case stemming from allegations that Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users without their consent for voter profiling linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. A jury found that Meta misled consumers about its data privacy practices, prompting the judge to impose the penalty. New Mexico Attorney General Ral Torrez described the verdict as one of the largest single-state judgments against a company in US history. The state's attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. 
In his order following the verdict, Judge Francis Mathew said the company’s alleged wrongdoing had continued for years and involved its core business practices. “Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices,” Mathew wrote.The judge said a penalty exceeding $219 billion was warranted under state law but reduced the amount to $25 billion. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The verdict was the second in six months by a Santa Fe jury in a lawsuit brought by the state of New Mexico against Meta Platforms. In the first trial, which ended in March, a Santa Fe jury ​found Meta misled users ⁠about young users' safety on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties. After a second phase of that trial, a judge directed the company to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and ordered Meta to implement measures to protect teen Facebook and Instagram users in New Mexico.