New Mexico jury holds Facebook liable for deceiving users on privacy
A New Mexico jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy protections, siding with the state over the Cambridge Analytica data breach.
A jury in New Mexico has found Facebook liable for misleading users about the privacy protections it offered on its platform, handing state prosecutors a victory in a case tied to one of the social network's most consequential data scandals.
The verdict, delivered in Santa Fe, leaves it to the judge to set the financial penalty. Lawyers for the state have asked for the maximum of $5,000 for each violation.
The two-week trial examined claims that the company deceived its users about a data breach that began with a third-party personality quiz. That quiz harvested information from roughly 87 million profiles, which was then sold to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used the data to build targeted advertisements. The firm, which has since shut down, counted the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump among its clients.
Jurors accepted the prosecution's case, concluding that Facebook's failure to safeguard user data affected the state's entire population of more than two million people.
The outcome adds to the legal scrutiny the platform has faced over how it handled user information and what it told the public about those practices.