Meta’s $25 billion judgment should lead to privacy people can actually use.

Twenty-five billion dollars gets attention. A useful privacy right should still work after the attention moves elsewhere.

New Mexico’s Department of Justice announced October 21 that a court ordered that amount in civil penalties in its Facebook case arising from Cambridge Analytica. A jury had found violations of the state’s consumer-protection law. Meta told ABC News it plans to appeal; the company disputes the ruling and argues the case intrudes on speech. Those are material facts about where the case stands. The amount is a judgment, not a receipt for money already delivered.

The ruling matters because a promise about personal information is part of the product people agree to use. A platform cannot expect its privacy language to inspire trust while treating that language as decoration. The public stakes are especially clear when a service also carries a person’s customers, neighborhood conversations, creative work and family connections. Leaving may be a choice, but it need not be a cheap or simple one.

That is why the familiar instruction to read the settings feels insufficient. Reading should help. Yet the company knows the system it has built, while the individual sees an interface and a set of promises. An honest market needs that difference in knowledge to be addressed, not quietly converted into an advantage over the customer.

There is a fair concern on the other side. A state’s response should be tied to demonstrated unlawful conduct, and an appeal exists to test the legal result. An enormous number does not answer every question about proportionality or remedy. Taking consumer rights seriously should include taking the court process seriously. Nobody needs to pretend the next stage has already happened to recognize the significance of this one.

Still, a headline about a penalty can become a substitute for asking what users need. I would measure practical accountability through understandable choices, accurate descriptions of who can access information, and a reliable way to change a decision. Those are standards this column proposes. They are not claims that this judgment itself imposes a particular new button or deadline.

The important word is understandable. A control that technically exists but leaves a person guessing about its effect does little to improve the bargain. A privacy explanation should let someone connect an action to a consequence without requiring them to become a specialist in the platform’s internal systems.

New Mexico’s case also makes state enforcement worth watching as an exercise of public power. Officials should explain the result accurately, including what remains disputed and what happens next. Celebrating a legal milestone and reporting its limits can belong in the same sentence.

The larger goal should be a digital economy in which useful services and honest terms reinforce each other. People should be able to participate, build businesses and keep relationships without treating uncertainty about their information as the unavoidable price of entry. The judgment is consequential. The standard it points toward should remain legible to the people living with the product.