A New Mexico state district court ordered Meta on 21 October to pay US$25bn in penalties after finding more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law, in litigation that grew out of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica revelations. Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook promised users they controlled their data and that "this was false", holding the company's privacy statements misleading. The case was filed in 2021 after Cambridge Analytica obtained data on roughly 87 million profiles through a personality quiz app that also harvested participants' friends' data. Meta's chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company will appeal. The penalty is by far the largest privacy sanction recorded against the company: it dwarfs the US$725m class-action settlement of 2022 and the US$5bn Federal Trade Commission penalty of 2019, and lands alongside an US$18bn multi-state child-safety settlement agreed in August.

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