Meta, the multinational responsible for Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram, has been sentenced to pay 25 billion dollars (22.278 billion euros) in the framework of a data protection procedure linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected the company almost ten years ago.
The judicial resolution, issued this Wednesday by a judge from the state of New Mexico after the guilty verdict delivered in September by a jury, sets a penalty among the highest ever imposed in the United States.
Judge Francis Mathew has established that Meta violated New Mexico's data protection regulations on more than 43 million occasions, which would imply, in principle, a fine of 5,000 dollars (4.456 million euros) for each infringement.
Thus, the tech company could have faced a penalty close to 220 billion dollars (196.042 billion euros), although the final amount has been set at 25 billion dollars. Interest at an annual rate of 15% will be applied to that amount until the total is fully paid.
"The extraordinary number of deliberate violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of the issues in which the violations occurred, the involvement of high-ranking Facebook officials, the number of affected individuals in New Mexico, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated false statements, as evidenced by the trial record, justify the imposition of the highest penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act," Mathew noted in his resolution.
Meta already ended last August several lawsuits related to the Cambridge Analytica case concerning mental and child health through an agreement amounting to 16.7 billion dollars (14.881 billion euros) reached with the attorneys general of 29 states, among which New Mexico was not included.