A New Mexico jury on Friday found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy protections, in a case tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The jury counted 43,899,720 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. Each violation can carry a fine of up to $5,000. The state is asking the judge for the maximum, which would total about $219 billion.
Judge Francis Mathew will decide the penalty at a later date. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez is pushing for the top amount. The state also wants Meta ordered to correct past statements and audit how it handles user data.
The two-week trial in Santa Fe centered on claims that Facebook misled users after data from about 87 million profiles was harvested through a third-party quiz and passed to Cambridge Analytica. Jurors found the deception affected the state’s full population of more than two million people.
Meta said it disagrees with the verdict. “We will continue to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record,” said spokesperson Alex Burgos. The company claimed the state’s evidence was outdated.