Meta’s $25B Fine Left Out Accountability for the Cambridge Analytica Data Privacy Scandal

Facebook quietly pays off the biggest political scandal in tech history

“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” wrote a New Mexico judge who ordered tech giant Meta to pay one of the largest data privacy case penalties in American history. The US$25 billion fine came in a case about how Trump campaign firm Cambridge Analytica deceptively used data from Facebook users without their permission to create psychographic profiles to target voters in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.But the New Me…

Meta’s $25B fine left out accountability for the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal

A New Mexico judge’s fine hit Meta for deception about the data privacy violations, not for the harm they caused. A researcher who helped uncover the scandal explains.

Meta’s $25B fine left out accountability for the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal

by Emma L. Briant, University of Notre Dame, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission] “The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” wrote a New Mexico judge who ordered tech giant Meta to pay one of the largest data privacy case penalties in American history. The US$25 billion fine came in a case about how Trump campaign firm Cambridge Analytica deceptively used data from Facebook users without their …