A New Mexico jury found 31 of 34 Meta statements about Facebook’s data sharing and privacy enforcement unfair or deceptive under New Mexico law. Each reached at least an estimated 1.4 million New Mexico Facebook users in 2020; a judge will decide Meta’s penalty.
New Mexico’s attorney general sued in 2021, arguing Meta sold Facebook users’ data to third-party apps and misled them about control over their information. The case stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal: 2018 reports said data from as many as 87 million users had been harvested through an app and used to profile voters. Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Meta’s lawyers argued that New Mexico cherry-picked snippets and ignored context in which the company had acknowledged its handling of privacy and misinformation was imperfect.
