Meta: EU sentences Facebook to pay 265 million euros. It is the second fine in less than three months
In September, the Irish DPC had already imposed a fine of €405 million. Total since the beginning of 2022: almost 1 billion euros.
Meta was ordered by the European Union to pay a fine of 265 million euros . The company that controls Facebook and Instagram was unable to protect the personal data of its users: in April 2021 the data of 533 million users were in fact published online.
In any case, the archive was not generated by a real data breach, but by a data scraping action (ie: scraping public information from profiles using software that automates the process) on a large scale.
It is the second fine received in Europe by Meta in the space of a few months: in September the Irish DPC had already imposed a fine of 405 million euros. Total since the beginning of the year: almost 1 billion euros.
According to the Irish-based authority, Meta would have disregarded the GDPR, in particular where the regulation prescribes that large platforms must protect user data with design and default choices suitable for this purpose.
Meanwhile, Meta announced that it has fixed the vulnerability that allowed the data scraping action reported in 2021. The company, which has not yet decided whether to appeal the fine by filing an appeal, reiterated that “unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and goes against our rules”.
