Meta, the multinational technology company owner of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram, has been ordered to pay 25 billion dollars (22.278 billion euros) in a proceeding for violation of data protection regulations initiated after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected the company almost ten years ago.
The ruling, issued this Wednesday by a judge from the state of New Mexico after the guilty verdict handed down in September by a jury, sets a penalty that ranks among the highest ever imposed in the United States.
Judge Francis Mathew has established that Meta violated New Mexico's data protection law on more than 43 million occasions, which would theoretically imply a penalty of 5,000 dollars (4.456 million euros) for each violation.
Thus, the company could have faced a total penalty close to 220 billion dollars (196.042 billion euros), although the final amount has been set at 25 billion dollars. Interest will be applied to this sum at an annual rate of 15% until the amount is fully satisfied.
"The extraordinary number of deliberate violations established 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 explained in his ruling.
In parallel, Meta had already settled in August several lawsuits related to the Cambridge Analytica case concerning mental and child health, through an agreement valued at 16.7 billion dollars (14.881 billion euros) reached with the attorneys general of 29 states. The attorney general of New Mexico, however, did not join that agreement.