A New Mexico judge has ordered Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties over its handling of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, according to a court filing issued Wednesday.
\n\nCNBC reports that New Mexico District Court Judge Francis Mathew signed the filing on October 21, closing out a legal fight that traces back to 2018, when it first came out that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed data belonging to 87 million users. The incident predated the company’s rebranding from Facebook to Meta.
\n\nA jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable in September for misleading New Mexico residents about how it collected and safeguarded their data and how it prevented harmful information from spreading. Jurors counted more than 43 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a possible civil penalty of up to $5,000. That math initially produced a $219.5 billion award, which Judge Mathew scaled back to $25 billion. Interest will accrue on the unpaid balance at 15 percent a year until Meta settles the debt in full.
\n\nIn his filing, Mathew wrote that “the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the…
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
