New Mexico Seeks Up to $40 Billion From Meta After Cambridge Analytica Privacy Verdict

New Mexico just told a judge exactly how much it thinks Meta's privacy lies were worth: somewhere between $35 billion and $40 billion. The state asked the court to order the penalties after a jury sided with it late last month in a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

That number would be a staggering bill even for a company of Meta's size. And the state is framing it as the restrained option.

A verdict built on 26 statements

New Mexico sued in 2021, arguing Meta misled users about how it handled their data. The backdrop is the scandal everyone remembers: Cambridge Analytica harvested information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without consent and used it to target political ads.

We covered the moment jurors found Meta liable under the state's Unfair Practices Act. The details of that finding are what make the penalty fight so dramatic. Jurors examined 29 public statements from the company and found 26 of them misleading, on privacy and on how Meta handled misinformation.

Multiply those statements by the number of New Mexico Facebook users they reached, and you get roughly 43 million consumer protection violations. Under the verdict, the state says it could theoretically have asked for as much as $219 billion.

Speaking Meta's language

State attorney Randi McGinn didn't pretend this was about symbolism. She argued the court should speak to Meta in the language it understands, money and stock price, and that any penalty needs to be large enough to register on the company's books, according to Reuters.

It's a blunt theory of deterrence. Fines that amount to a rounding error for a trillion-dollar company get treated as a cost of doing business, and New Mexico is betting a judge is tired of that pattern.

Meta's counteroffer

Meta, unsurprisingly, sees things differently. The company asked the court to cap penalties at $3.45 billion, arguing New Mexico never proved that residents were actually misled by the statements in question.

That leaves a gap of more than $30 billion between the two sides. The judge is expected to rule later this month.

Whatever the number, it lands in a year when states are increasingly willing to fight tech giants over privacy on their own terms, even as some governors balk at going further, as Gavin Newsom did when he vetoed a bill on secret smart glasses recording. New Mexico, at least, isn't flinching.