Meta hit with GDPR Penalties Costing $940M
The social media conglomerate was accused of violating the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
DPC Fines Meta Platform with $275 million
The American multinational technology conglomerate, Meta, has been fined €265 million ($275 million) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The DPC launched the penalty on the 14th of April, 2021. The conglomerate was hit with the penalty after reports claimed that Facebook, one of Meta’s leading social media platforms, failed to prevent hackers from siphoning off personal information from more than 530 million Facebook users in a 2019 data leak.
However, this is only one time such a privacy violation penalty by GDPR has been meted out against Meta. About a year ago, the company’s leading mobile messaging platform, WhatsApp, was fined €225M (~$267M) penalty for transparency violations. In March 2022, Facebook was penalized for historical data breaches, costing Meta 18.6 million dollars. Furthermore, Instagram, another major platform under the Meta Platform, was also hit with a €405 million penalty for breaching children's privacy. This took place in September 2022.
Meta must comply with International Regulations
Part of the violations meted out by the DPC in a statement is that Meta Platforms Ireland (MPIL) still processes personal data, including default searchability. However, DPC wants Meta to amend these processes to prevent the immediate access of personal data to an indefinite number of natural persons. The DPC deputy commissioner said: “This order is made to ensure compliance with Article 25(2) GDPR.”
Meta said in a statement:
“Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works. That’s why we have cooperated fully with the Irish Data Protection Commission on this important issue. We made changes to our system during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape features in this way using phone numbers. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”