Structural risks
These risks apply to every Meta product. They are legal obligations and corporate
practices that individual products cannot override. A subsidiary cannot opt out of an
FTC consent decree. A company cannot selectively ignore its home country's intelligence
law for one product. These risks set a grade floor of
F — no Meta product
can score better than this, regardless of its own privacy settings.
critical
Two FTC consent decrees ($5 billion)
2019-07-24
Meta is under two FTC consent decrees (2012 and 2019). The 2019 order imposed a $5 billion fine — the largest ever — and requires a privacy committee with personal liability for executives. Every product Meta makes operates under these constraints, yet violations continue.
critical
PRISM participant since 2009
2009-06-03
Facebook joined the PRISM programme in June 2009. The NSA can collect stored communications directly from Meta's servers.
critical
Cross-subsidiary data sharing
2023-05-22
Meta shares data across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Despite WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption, metadata (contacts, usage patterns, location) flows to Meta's advertising infrastructure. The EU fined Meta EUR 1.2 billion for transferring EU data to the US.
critical
Four-state trial seeking up to $200 billion over child addiction
2026-08-17
On 17 August 2026 California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey took Meta to a federal jury in the first bellwether trial over child harm, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The states plead up to $1.4 trillion in consumer-protection penalties and told the court $200 billion is the realistic figure — roughly 14% of Meta's $1.45 trillion market value. The case alleges Meta knowingly engineered features to addict children and concealed the harm, and separately that it violated COPPA by collecting data on children. Deputy California AG Meghan O'Neill told the jury Meta's model was to "hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and then hide the truth from the public", citing an internal Meta report titled "The Young Ones are the Best Ones". Meta has already been hit with roughly $942 million in New Mexico penalties and a $6 million verdict in Los Angeles County. Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri are expected to testify. Meta spent over $2 billion on legal costs in the April-June quarter alone.