Facebook is on trial in New Mexico again to determine Meta’s liability in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This time, the lawsuit puts Facebook’s parent company under examination over allegations that it misled users on how their personal information was collected, shared, and used.
“Facebook’s data breach didn’t just expose private information,” New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said in a statement. “It revealed a pattern of misrepresentation about how user data was collected, shared, and exploited.”
He said the trial seeks to hold Meta accountable for what the state describes as violations of the trust that New Mexicans and global users place in the company.
The proceedings in New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court on Wednesday are expected to last about four weeks. During the trial, New Mexico is planning to present expert testimony on corporate practices and video depositions from some of Meta’s most senior executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and its former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, accused of her role in monetizing user data.
The state originally filed the lawsuit in 2021 for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, which prohibits deceptive business conduct.
The lawsuit centers on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which erupted in 2018 after it was revealed that data from tens of millions of Facebook accounts had been harvested without users’ proper authorization and used to build voter profiles and target political advertising during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit campaign.
New Mexico argues that Meta misled Facebook users about the extent to which their personal information was protected and how it could be accessed and exploited. It alleges that the data of some 350,000 New Mexicans was exposed.
The state is seeking court orders designed to prevent future privacy violations. It also seeks the maximum civil penalties available under the Unfair Practices Act for each violation.
The trial comes after a separate court decision ordering Meta to pay $567 million in connection with what the court found to be harms to young people’s mental health linked to its social media platforms.
The latest trial represents another legal battle for Meta over whether it did enough to protect the people whose personal data helped build its empire.
