The price of tapping “accept”: 25 billion dollars

The promise you got when you tapped “accept” on Facebook now has a price tag.

In September, a jury in Santa Fe found that Meta had misled users in New Mexico, among other things about who could access their data. The jury found 26 of 29 statements misleading. On 21 October, Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty at 25 billion dollars.

The case began after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when data from up to 87 million Facebook users was harvested through a third-party app. State law allows up to 5,000 dollars per violation, and the jury counted over 43 million. The money goes to New Mexico’s schools.

Meta says it does not sell user data and plans to appeal. In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Meta 5 billion dollars. This penalty is five times larger, from a single state.

When broken privacy promises cost billions, perhaps they will be kept. What have the apps on your phone promised you?