Adding to long list of penalties, Facebook parent Meta faces huge fine over its use of data by Irish Data Protection Commission.
After the information of more than half a billion users was exposed on a hacking website, Ireland’s data authority fined Facebook owner Meta €265 million on Monday, November 28.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said it had reached the decision following a “comprehensive inquiry process, including cooperation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU”.
Along with several other significant international tech firms including Google, Apple, and Twitter, Meta’s European operations are headquartered in Dublin.
Ireland’s data protection agency is the principal regulator in charge of keeping them accountable as a result. The watchdog discovered two sections of the EU’s data protection legislation had been broken by the social media juggernaut headed by Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook owner was ordered by the DPC to “bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe” in addition to paying a fine, the DPC claime.
A spokeswoman for Meta responded to the fine by stating that the company had “cooperated completely” with the DPC on the matter.
The tech company had previously claimed that hackers had “scraped” the data from the website in 2019, using a feature intended to make it simple for users to find friends using contact lists.
“We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers,” the spokesperson said. “Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”
In order to ascertain whether the EU-wide General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) charter on data rights and the associated Irish legislation had been violated, the Irish watchdog opened its investigation in April 2021.
Social media users have more rights over their data under the GDPR, which took effect in 2018. The penalty comes after the Irish watchdog made the historic choice to fine Meta a record €405 million in September after discovering that its Instagram platform had broken rules regarding the handling of children’s data.
