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Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case

80 points cbg0 2 hours ago 38 comments

google234123 1 hour ago | parent

We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.

taude 1 hour ago | parent

That's because 47% of the Senate are attorneys/former practicing attorneys. Need more ex-Scientists in office. :)

freejazz 13 minutes ago | parent

No one is stopping them. There's no requirement that you be a lawyer. And lol, what a crazy idea... a lawmaker studying lawyering?! What a scam!

KZerda 1 hour ago | parent

Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.

mingus88 1 hour ago | parent

I support the death penalty for corporations.

newsclues 1 hour ago | parent

I support the licensure of boards of directors and CEO types, and enforcement of laws against the people who control companies.

If the CFO commits a crime, they can't get a license anymore. Start getting the bad actors out of positions of power.

JasserInicide 28 minutes ago | parent

Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.

ludicrousdispla 41 minutes ago | parent

'capitalist punishment'

cookingmyserver 6 minutes ago | parent

We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...

Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.

newsclues 1 hour ago | parent

But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.

Change the law, it just that easy.

JohnMakin 1 hour ago | parent

Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.

Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.

newsclues 1 hour ago | parent

If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.

WheatMillington 10 minutes ago | parent

Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?

kube-system 1 hour ago | parent

Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.

And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.

reaperducer 49 minutes ago | parent

Other countries don't have this problem

Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.

kube-system 42 minutes ago | parent

Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to.

Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.

advisedwang 18 minutes ago | parent

The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.

WheatMillington 12 minutes ago | parent

Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?

lysace 1 hour ago | parent

Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.

gsky 26 minutes ago | parent

America fines their companies left and right but won't allow other countries to do for the same wrongdoings.

Its very easy to understand the motives but other countries lack back bone to ban these companies

Noaidi 1 hour ago | parent

The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.

bananamogul 1 hour ago | parent

All the states that participated in the class action settlement got $725 million combined.

New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.

Great timing for the AG who’s up for reelection on November 3 (even though it was the previous AG who made the call).

gruez 59 minutes ago | parent

>New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.

No because that's still subject to appeal, unlike the settlement. "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush", etc.

whycome 46 minutes ago | parent

That’s all framing. If they use the win for their reelection campaign…they just won’t mention the appeals process.

freejazz 16 minutes ago | parent

What are the grounds for the appeal? How does NM law look on that issue? It's a significantly reduced judgment too.

Like, yeah, you have a point in the abstract, but barring any actual supportive facts, it doesn't seem like a good point.

alex1138 59 minutes ago | parent

So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?

ok123456 57 minutes ago | parent

The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.

Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.

donchuru 47 minutes ago | parent

> Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.

True, and considering the gravity of this situation, you'd think they're would've been more legal consequences for FB/Meta

I see similar dynamics happening on X, where it is just being used to spread hate and division.

Perhaps it's high time we had an international criminal justice system for social media companies.

whycome 44 minutes ago | parent

Ad campaign? We are lucky they didn’t make the settlement in “Meta Quest Cash” or “Ad Buy Credit”

gruez 31 minutes ago | parent

>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.

No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.

> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

dominotw 44 minutes ago | parent

i hate that zuck has his ad empire funding all sort of stupid shit. Nothing can even touch him as long as ad dollars keep flowing.

why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform. i hate it so much.

mike_bob 39 minutes ago | parent

Not enough.

richwater 30 minutes ago | parent

Jury based punitive damages are constantly overturned because they are not legal experts and don't understand anything.

Anyone who thinks Meta will actually pay this amount have no clue what they're talking about.

advisedwang 20 minutes ago | parent

The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.

freejazz 14 minutes ago | parent

They are also not punitive damages, and Meta was also found to be willful.

devsda 26 minutes ago | parent

> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.

umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.

They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .

Otherwise it's just cost of business.

ReptileMan 15 minutes ago | parent

Diseconomies of scale.

tomjen3 11 minutes ago | parent

How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.