Meta’s settlement comes in as one of the largest of its kind. The agreement puts the social media giant’s payment at over 12-times higher than the previous highest settlement in the past four years—a mark Meta itself kept up to that point with its $1.4 billion settlement in 2024. At up to $17.1 billion, state attorneys general describe it as the largest state consumer-protection settlement outside of the tobacco settlements of the 1990s—and it is the largest settlement ever reached with a single company in the New York attorney general’s office (the previous being in 2022 with the state’s $7.4 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family over the opioid crisis).
Previous settlements surrounding children and teen safety include TikTok’s $400 million children’s privacy COPPA settlement in 2026, Meta’s $1.4 billion Texas biometric data privacy settlement in 2024, Google’s $1.375 billion Texas data privacy settlement in 2025, Meta’s $725 Facebook user privacy settlement in 2023, and Google’s $391.5 million location-tracking privacy settlement in 2022.
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