A judge has put a price on Facebook's privacy promises: 25 billion dollars

The number started a lot higher. Judge Francis Mathew worked out that New Mexico law supported a penalty of more than 219 billion dollars, based on 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection act at up to 5,000 dollars each. He brought it down to 25 billion, which the state attorney general still believes is the largest penalty of its kind ever handed down. Meta says it expects to win on appeal.

The case was filed in 2021 and goes back to Cambridge Analytica, the personality quiz that scraped the profiles of roughly 87 million Facebook users and sold what it found to a political consultancy. A jury in September found 26 of the 29 statements Meta and its executives had made about privacy to be misleading. The ruling puts it bluntly: Facebook promised users that they controlled their data, and that was false. Mathew wrote that the company's wrongdoing "goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices."

One detail in the judgment is worth carrying away, because it still describes how most accounts work. The privacy settings people actually found and adjusted governed what other users could see. A separate set of controls, which many people did not know existed, governed what third-party apps could pull out of the account. Tightening the first did nothing to the second. If you have had a Facebook or Google account for a decade, the list of apps you once gave access to is longer than you remember, and nothing removes them but you. None of the 25 billion goes to users, incidentally. Under New Mexico's constitution it goes to the state's schools.

Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check covers the accounts signed in on your PC and the settings sitting around them, which is the local half of the same housekeeping.