Meta Fined €265m Over Data Protection Breach That Hit More Than 500m Users – The owner of Facebook has been fined €265m (£230m) by the Irish data watchdog following a breach that resulted in the online publication of the private details of more than 500 million users. Meta violated two sections of the EU’s data protection rules, according to the Data Protection Commission (DPC), when details of Facebook users from around the world were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019.
Last year, the data appeared on a hacker website, prompting an investigation by the DPC, the EU agency responsible for regulating Meta. The watchdog reported that a large percentage of users were from the European Union. In addition to the punishment, it “imposed a reprimand and an order” forcing Meta to “bring its processing into compliance by executing a variety of specified remedial actions within a set period of time.”
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In a statement Meta said: “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. Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.” The punishment brings the total amount of fines imposed on Meta by the DPC to nearly €1bn since September last year.
In September, Meta was fined €405 million for allowing minors to create Instagram accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses, while in March the watchdog fined Meta €17 million for additional GDPR violations and in September of last year, it fined Meta’s WhatsApp €225 million for severe and serious GDPR violations.
However, one legal expert questioned whether strict enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union would have the intended deterrent impact. David Hackett, head of data protection at the Addleshaw Godleshaw office in Ireland, remarked, “By any metric, these are significant fines.”
“GDPR envisaged the imposition of such fines in part to serve as a deterrent to other companies which might consider breaching the law. We are likely to see increased debate about whether such fines actually influence corporate behaviour or if some companies simply see them as an added cost of doing business.”
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Apple, Google, TikTok, and other technology platforms are regulated by the DPC due to the location of their EU headquarters in Ireland. It presently has 40 open probes into such businesses, including 13 involving Meta. The Irish regulator stated in a statement that other relevant EU regulators agreed with the judgment published on Monday, after it shared a draft ruling with them last month as part of the bloc’s “one-stop shop” approach for regulating multinational corporations.
